Against nationalism - Anarchist Federation

Published in September 2009, an analysis of nationalism, where it comes from, and why anarchists fundamentally oppose it.

Submitted by Django on October 9, 2009

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

Against Nationalism

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 incl¬ude 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 16th to 19th 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[1], 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[2] (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[3] , 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[4] 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’[5] 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[6]. 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 ‘co-operation’ 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 pre-empt 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 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 19th 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.[7] 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[8]. 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 20th 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 20th 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-19th 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 SOLUTION 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 thousands wounded, 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.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.

_______________________________________________________________

Footnotes

[1] 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.

[2] The wave of religious and social upheaval across Europe which established Protestantism and saw the decline in power of the Catholic Church.

[3] 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.

[4]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.

[5] 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.

[6] 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.

[7] 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.

[8] 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.

  • 1A 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

Attachments

Comments

AIW

15 years 2 months ago

In reply to by libcom.org

Submitted by AIW on October 12, 2009

The AFed wrote:

"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."

I've not seen any evidence of these various very serious charges. When I met the commander of Al-Aqsa Martyrs brigade in the Northern West Bank, Zacharia Zebadiah, who has a Jewish girlfriend, he asked that governments define the word "terrorist" since he argued that people have the right to defend themselves.

They put the word ‘martyr’ in quotes; a massive insult to all those killed in the anti-fascist struggle. It seems this could be more about competing organisations seeking to devide the movement in order to increase their power. The AF come close to implying that the Palestinian refugees do not have any right to return. These polemics will increase the depression of Palestinians and their supporters.

Django

15 years 2 months ago

In reply to by libcom.org

Submitted by Django on October 12, 2009

AIW

I've not seen any evidence of these various very serious charges. When I met the commander of Al-Aqsa Martyrs brigade in the Northern West Bank, Zacharia Zebadiah, who has a Jewish girlfriend, he asked that governments define the word "terrorist" since he argued that people have the right to defend themselves.

Why specific charges? Your mates in Al-Aqsa Martyrs Brigade destroyed Palestine Workers' Radio for 'inciting internal conflicts'. Hamas used violence and intimidation against the teachers' and hospital workers strikes in 2006. In fact one of its first acts on seizing power in Gaza was to capture the trade union offices and plant their flag on the roof. Or do you want evidence of what life is like for gays and lesbians under Hamas?

I'm not sure what this Al-Aqsa commander's semantic queries have to do with the text to be honest, as we don't talk about 'terrorism' in it. Its pretty clear though that Al-Aqsa Martyrs brigade are a nationalist force like any other, and would act like any other in the face of a militant working class (a situation that is unlikely in Palestine, unfortunately).

The use of 'martyr' in the section quoted clearly refers to the fact that Hamas called on Palestinians to resist one of the most advanced militaries in the world, a call they largely and sensibly ignored as it would have meant certain death. Palestinians wisely saw this as no 'martyrdom' at all.

Finally, we're clear on stating that we don't think ethnicity grants any moral rights to lands. This is the case whether you are a Jew born in Russia who has never seen Israel or a Palestinian born in Jordan who has never seen Palestine. On the other hand we support the free movement of peoples and the abolition of borders.

Yorkie Bar

15 years 2 months ago

In reply to by libcom.org

Submitted by Yorkie Bar on October 12, 2009

Zionazis, obv.

~J.

Khawaga

15 years 2 months ago

In reply to by libcom.org

Submitted by Khawaga on October 12, 2009

AIW, to be fair, I do not think you have understood the general argument, which is one based on a class analysis. For example, concepts such as 'right to defend' for groups of nations and 'right to return' do not make any sense when you're actually against nations (and pro-working class everywhere, including Palestine and Israel). People should be allowed to settle anywhere they feel like regardless of where they were born, their legal status branded on their passports or ID-cards.

If you want evidence of the various serious charges I recommend you to read the Amnesty International report on Hamas repression of political opponents during the last Gaza war. That's just one piece of evidence.

It seems this could be more about competing organisations seeking to devide the movement in order to increase their power.

Which is exactly what the nationalists in Hamas and Fatah do while repressing political opponents.

AIW

15 years 2 months ago

In reply to by libcom.org

Submitted by AIW on October 13, 2009

Your mates in Al-Aqsa Martyrs Brigade destroyed Palestine Workers' Radio

Thank you for the link, which points to an atrocity by the Al-Aqsa Martyrs brigade in Gaza. You're wrong to blame this on the commander of Al-Aqsa Martyrs brigade in the Northern West Bank.

I do not think you have understood the general argument, which is one based on a class analysis

Power relations in Palestine; particularly in Gaza and the West Bank; are not the same as those in a simple class society. A war of extermination is being waged against the Palestinians and they are resisting it. (See the film Arna's Children) Comparisons with Western comfortable, if exploited, lives are less relevant than comparisons with Apartheid South Africa, with the Warsaw Ghetto, or with the film Inglorious Bastards.

I don't mean that there are not class differences in Palestine; I certainly don't mean that there are not class differences in England; I mean that your understanding of the class struggle in England can lead you to misleading conclusions about the struggle in Palestine.

People should work together on what they agree on. The AFed excludes the majority of Anarchist Communists from membership by having precise "positions" on issues other than Anarchist Communism.

The Palestinian people will also resist and survive and continue struggling and will continue to have sympathy from below for their cause.

Subcomandante Insurgente Marcos

Django

15 years 2 months ago

In reply to by libcom.org

Submitted by Django on October 13, 2009

AIW

Thank you for the link, which points to an atrocity by the Al-Aqsa Martyrs brigade in Gaza. You're wrong to blame this on the commander of Al-Aqsa Martyrs brigade in the Northern West Bank.

I didn't "blame" any specific commander, I pointed out an act his organisation was resposible for - a responsibility claimed by "the higher military council" of Al-Aqsa Martyrs brigade.

Though to be honest I'm suspecting that your posts might not be entirely serious based on this:

Comparisons with Western comfortable, if exploited, lives are less relevant than comparisons with Apartheid South Africa, with the Warsaw Ghetto, or with the film Inglorious Bastards.

:confused:

Joseph Kay

15 years 2 months ago

In reply to by libcom.org

Submitted by Joseph Kay on October 13, 2009

AIW

Comparisons with Western comfortable, if exploited, lives are less relevant than comparisons with Apartheid South Africa

this is actually a great example. the end of apardheid has done fuck all for (mostly black) working class south africans, poverty is as bad as ever (arguably worse with water and electricity privatisation and metering) and you still get murdered by the state/state-backed thugs for organising in the Townships. Actually the ANC are a great case study in national 'liberation', and a sign of what we could expect from Hamas if accepted into the 'international community.'

Django

15 years 2 months ago

In reply to by libcom.org

Submitted by Django on October 13, 2009

Taking your points on good faith though,

Power relations in Palestine; particularly in Gaza and the West Bank; are not the same as those in a simple class society. A war of extermination is being waged against the Palestinians and they are resisting it. (See the film Arna's Children) Comparisons with Western comfortable, if exploited, lives are less relevant than comparisons with Apartheid South Africa, with the Warsaw Ghetto, or with the film Inglorious Bastards.

I don't mean that there are not class differences in Palestine; I certainly don't mean that there are not class differences in England; I mean that your understanding of the class struggle in England can lead you to misleading conclusions about the struggle in Palestine.

All you seem to be saying here is that there are class differences in Palestine, but we should ignore them (and the conflicts they produce) because there is a 'war of extermination' being waged against Palestine and a 'resistance' against this war.

Its certainly true that Gaza and the West bank are typical third world capitalist economies with a high rate of unemployment due to the Israeli/Egyptian blockade. This produces class conflicts which have put workers at odds with both main factions, despite the sectional nature of the unions. Presumably you don't support the workers in these cases?

The fact is, theres a lot more happening in Palestine than a simple 'resistance'. There are different forces with their own motives and own interests. There are plenty of locally-led struggles over things like access to land, resources, work, water etc which are essentially class struggles and which should be supported accordingly. On the other hand there are capitalist factions with the aim of creating an independent nation-state or something close to it with themselves in charge. If you are giving the example of South Africa, then the fate of South Africans under the ANC (i.e. being mostly pretty bad) is what you could expect for Palestinians in a 'free palestine' under Hamas or Fatah.

Likewise it doesn't make much sense to talk about a 'war of extermination'. Under international law, what is happening in parts of Palestine is technically ethnic cleansing, under the UN definition: "rendering an area ethnically homogeneous by using force or intimidation to remove from a given area persons of another ethnic or religious group". But there isn't a war of extermination, and Israel is not 'fascist'.

AIW

15 years 2 months ago

In reply to by libcom.org

Submitted by AIW on October 13, 2009

Presumably you don't support the workers in these cases?

Of course I support the workers! What an offensive assumption!

Israel is not 'fascist'

I can see Israel would not appear fascist from Israel, but from the West Bank it certainly does appear to be fascist. Israel's foriegn minister, Lieberman, is a fascist. See also: Zionist Collaboration with the Nazis by LENNI BRENNER

Inglorious Bastards makes a serious argument about violence.

Django

15 years 2 months ago

In reply to by libcom.org

Submitted by Django on October 13, 2009

AIW

Of course I support the workers! What an offensive assumption!

If thats the case then I don't see how you can (consistantly) disagree with our arguments from a class struggle position. Otherwise the argument that Palestine isn't a 'normal' calss society and that this should influence our approach to it is pretty meaningless. I'm assuming you consider yourself some kind of anarchist here based on your earlier posts.

AIW

I can see Israel would not appear fascist from Israel, but from the West Bank it certainly does appear to be fascist. Israel's foriegn minister, Lieberman, is a fascist. See also: Zionist Collaboration with the Nazis by LENNI BRENNER

Fascism is a pretty specific kind of politics though and a kind of society its pretty easy to identify - a one party state, a corporatist system, a dictator figure, extreme nationalism, myths of national decline, etc. Israel on the other hand is a liberal democracy, and is as brutal as other liberal democracies when it come to warfare. The odd rightwing populist cabinet member doesn't change that.

Demogorgon303

15 years 2 months ago

In reply to by libcom.org

Submitted by Demogorgon303 on October 13, 2009

The argument that "power relations in Palestine; particularly in Gaza and the West Bank; are not the same as those in a simple class society" has been used to justify every national liberation struggle from time immemorial.

Every nationalism has its own special pleading as why it is special and not as bad as all the others.

Ironically, the Jewish state itself has its justification in a "war of extermination" carried out against the Jewish people in WW2. What has been the result? The establishment of a monster state that is now carrying out its own brutal oppression of groups within its borders.

A Palestinian state, should one ever arise, will wallow in the blood, sweat and misery of the masses just like every other national state. We can already see the results in the proto-states that have been established under the Hamas / Fatah regimes.

AIW

15 years 2 months ago

In reply to by libcom.org

Submitted by AIW on October 13, 2009

Israel is the occupying power in the West Bank and is blockading Gaza (making Israel the occupying power in Gaza under international law). These are not "Hamas / Fatah regimes". Would you oppose Jewish resistance to the Nazis then?

Israel on the other hand is a liberal democracy

Israel's "Law of Return" is designed to maintain the state's "Jewish nature

To resist is to exist!

Django

15 years 2 months ago

In reply to by libcom.org

Submitted by Django on October 13, 2009

AIW

These are not "Hamas / Fatah regimes"

So are you disputing that there is a Palestinian Authority with a police force currently disputed between Hamas and Fatah and split between the two in Gaza and the West Bank? Or that Hamas and Fatah have effective control over those regions?

AIW

Would you oppose Jewish resistance to the Nazis then?

The two situations aren't identical - Palestinians aren't being exterminated on an industrial scale. Anyway, it depends what you mean by 'resistance' and like I said in the post above there is more going on in Palestine than simple 'resistance'. if there were Jewish nationalist groups in control of pseudo-states engaged in an asymmetrical war and willing to use violence against the working class then I'd oppose them. But thats a historical fantasy.

Most anarchists, council communists etc did take an internationalist position on the Second World War, quite rightly.

Steven.

15 years 2 months ago

In reply to by libcom.org

Submitted by Steven. on October 13, 2009

Actually, I think that question about supporting Jews resisting the Nazis is a very good one.

Yes, of course we would support people directly resisting oppression. However, trying to set up your own state is not part of this.

And of course it was the setting up of this Israeli state following the Holocaust which is carrying out these brutal actions now.

Joseph Kay

15 years 2 months ago

In reply to by libcom.org

Submitted by Joseph Kay on October 13, 2009

Steven.

Actually, I think that question about supporting Jews resisting the Nazis is a very good one.

a better analogy to Hamas/Fatah is the Jewish Ghetto Police than the Warsaw Ghetto uprising. the fact Hamas, Fatah and the rest have shown themselves perfectly willing to repress and murder the very palestinians they claim to be liberating shows that, be they political opponents, gays, prostitutes trade unionists etc.

and i'm sorry but Israel simply isn't waging a war of extermination. the appaling casualties in Gaza during the last assault were less than those in Fallujah or loads of other modern military assaults on densly packed civilian areas. there were war crimes committed left right and centre, there's arguably an intention to ethnically cleanse the whole area by immiserating the non-jewish population into emigration, but there is simply no nazi-style industrial extermination of palestinians, which throws out the whole Warsaw Ghetto analogy anyway.

Tojiah

15 years 2 months ago

In reply to by libcom.org

Submitted by Tojiah on October 13, 2009

To be fair, it does seem that Israel is sliding towards no-hold-barred totalitarianism in the next decade or so. Of course, when you point it out, people just dismiss you, because leftist activistoids had been crying "fascist" for ages.

AIW

15 years 2 months ago

In reply to by libcom.org

Submitted by AIW on October 27, 2009

The Continuing Appeal of Nationalism - Fredy Perlman

Hitler's (and the Zionists') treatment of the nation as a racial entity was another central tenet. The cadres were recruited from among people depleted of their ancestors' kinships and customs, and consequently the liberators were not distinguishable from the oppressors in terms of language, beliefs, customs or weapons; the only welding material that held them to each other and to their mass base was the welding material that had held white servants to white bosses on the American frontier; the "racial bond" gave identities to those without identity, kinship to those who had no kin, community to those who had lost their community; it was the last bond of the culturally depleted.

Chris Hedges on “American Fascists: The Christian Right and the War On America”

AMY GOODMAN: Christian Zionist Movement, how does it fit into this?

CHRIS HEDGES: Well, the relationship between this radical movement and the radical right in Israel is one that really brings together Messianic Jews and Messianic Christians who believe that they have been given a divine or a moral right to control one-fifth of the world’s population who are Muslim. It’s a really repugnant ideology. The radical Christian right in this country is deeply anti-Semitic. I mean, look at what they—you know, when the end times come, except for this 144,000 Jews who flee to Petra and are converted—I think this was a creation of Tim LaHaye—Jews will be destroyed, along with all other nonbelievers, including people like myself who are nominal Christians, in their eyes. You know, there is no respect for Judaism in and of itself. It’s an abstraction. It’s, you know, Jews have to control Israel, because that is one more step towards Armageddon. And I find that alliance strange and very shortsighted on the part of many rightwing Israelis and rightwing Jews in the United States.

AMY GOODMAN: This latest story, the Anti-Defamation League calling on Georgia State Rep. Ben Bridges to apologize for a memo distributed under his name that says the teaching of evolution should be banned in public schools, because it is a religious deception stemming from an ancient Jewish sect. The memo calls on lawmakers to introduce legislation that would end the teaching of evolution in public schools, because it’s “a deception that is causing incalculable harm to every student and every truth-loving citizen.”

You think Zionist's responses to "the demographic problem" since 1948 do not constitute a war of extermination? Controversial.
The AFed would stand outside Auschwitz screaming "down with Zionism" while everyone else was busy trying to stop the holocaust. This pamphlet isn't about principles, it is about competition for power within the far left.

Django

15 years 2 months ago

In reply to by libcom.org

Submitted by Django on October 27, 2009

If you are quoting Fredy Perlman to counter our argument then you clearly haven't read The Continuing Appeal of Nationalism properly:

Fredy Perlman

Every oppressed population can become a nation, a photographic negative of the oppressor nation, a place where the former packer is the supermarket's manager, where the former security guard is the chief of police. By applying the corrected strategy, every security guard can follow the precedent of ancient Rome's Praetorian guards ... Even before the seizure of power, a gang can call itself a Front and offer heavily taxed and constantly policed poor people something they still lack: a tribute-gathering organization and a hit-squad, namely supplementary tax farmers and police, the people's own. In these ways, people can be liberated of the traits of their victimized ancestors; all the relics that still survive from pre-industrial times and non-capitalist cultures can at last be permanently extirpated.

In fact the entire argument of that pamphlet is similar to ours: nationalism is and always has been a vital weapon in capital's arsenal, that there is nothing "progressive" in "national liberation movements", and that "liberated nations" throughout history have shown themselves as capable of brutality as their oppressors. That is why it concludes with the line, "What concentration camp manager, national executioner or torturer is not a descendant of oppressed people?" All the quote you provide is arguing is that nationalism, of whatever stripe, requires "welding material", and that that material can be race. Which is exactly what we argue. He even explicitly mentions Palestinian nationalism!

The second quote in your post has no bearing on any of the posts above or the argument of the pamphlet, so I'm not sure what your point is supposed to be.

AIW

You think Zionist's responses to "the demographic problem" since 1948 do not constitute a war of extermination? Controversial.

No, because it clearly isn't. I have already said that it is technically ethnic cleansing though. Feel free to provide evidence that a war of extermination is taking place - I'm happy to be convinced.

AIW

The AFed would stand outside Auschwitz screaming "down with Zionism" while everyone else was busy trying to stop the holocaust. This pamphlet isn't about principles, it is about competition for power within the far left.

If you are claiming that the AF hasn't been involved with anti-war activity around Israel/Palestine you are badly uninformed, as we've been heavily involved in demonstrations and occupations and have had members visit Palestine with the ISM. We've also done fundraising for Anarchists Against the Wall. The second paragraph of the pamphlet says as much.

To be honest, I wonder whether you've even read it, given all your arguments are about one paragraph from the preface, ignoring even some of what is immediately before it. It'd be helpful if you'd explain how the pamphlet isn't about principles - is the analysis wrong?

Joseph Kay

15 years 2 months ago

In reply to by libcom.org

Submitted by Joseph Kay on October 27, 2009

AIW

You think Zionist's responses to "the demographic problem" since 1948 do not constitute a war of extermination? Controversial

did you read what I said? the treatment of the palestinian population is terrible, but Gaza is not an industrial extermination camp. attempts to drive a population out of an area may well constitute ethnic cleansing (the whole premise of a 'jewish state' seems to suppose this), but extermination/genocide it is not.

AIW

The AFed would stand outside Auschwitz screaming "down with Zionism" while everyone else was busy trying to stop the holocaust.

baseless slander mate.

Yorkie Bar

15 years 2 months ago

In reply to by libcom.org

Submitted by Yorkie Bar on October 27, 2009

I think AIW has pretty much proved the AF are FULL NAZIS and COMPLETELY CULPABLE FOR THE HOLOCAUST, and youse should all be ashamed.

~J.

AIW

15 years 1 month ago

In reply to by libcom.org

Submitted by AIW on November 10, 2009

Django wrote

If you are quoting Fredy Perlman to counter our argument then you clearly haven't read The Continuing Appeal of Nationalism properly:

If you believe that Pearlman shared your opposition to "The Palestinian resistance" then we have certainly read his work differently.

Steven.

15 years 1 month ago

In reply to by libcom.org

Submitted by Steven. on November 10, 2009

AI W., Fredy Perlman was an internationalist, against all nationalisms, including those of "oppressed" nations, like Django and the people who run the site.

If you didn't realise that, then you should probably read his stuff again.

AIW

15 years 1 month ago

In reply to by libcom.org

Submitted by AIW on November 11, 2009

Yes, but being against all Nationalisms is a different position to opposition to resistance. I don't support any Nationalisms but I do defend communities rights to defend themselves. This resistance is often carried out by members of organisations such as the Al-Aqsa Martyrs brigade; as in the film Arna's Children. I think solidarity with the oppressed should not be conditional on their beliefs. I support the refugees right to return and see this as consistent with opposition to borders.

Sorry for my offensive comment:

The AFed would stand outside Auschwitz screaming "down with Zionism" while everyone else was busy trying to stop the holocaust.

I didn't mean to imply that you were Nazis. We would clearly both be involved in the resistance or dead in that situation.

I disagree with your premise that Israel is a democracy. See Jewish Peace News for example.

knightrose

15 years 1 month ago

In reply to by libcom.org

Submitted by knightrose on November 11, 2009

I disagree with your premise that Israel is a democracy. See Jewish Peace News for example.

The point is that it is a democracy. democracies are capable of being just as vile as dictatorships.

PartyBucket

15 years 1 month ago

In reply to by libcom.org

Submitted by PartyBucket on November 11, 2009

AIW

I think solidarity with the oppressed should not be conditional on their beliefs.

I think youve summed up pretty concisely there the type of thinking that leads so many on 'the left' to ally themselves with, or support (even 'conditionally') some pretty distasteful groups and characters.

Joseph Kay

15 years 1 month ago

In reply to by libcom.org

Submitted by Joseph Kay on November 11, 2009

knightrose

I disagree with your premise that Israel is a democracy. See Jewish Peace News for example.

The point is that it is a democracy. democracies are capable of being just as vile as dictatorships.

yes exactly. contra the Jewish Peace News piece, being an occupying power doesn't stop you being a democracy. Britain's occupying Iraq and Afghanistan at the moment without that changing the nature of its state. i'm not using 'democracy' with any positive connotations here, since i'm an anarchist. you get murderous democracies and relatively benign dictatorships, it's just a factual term to describe a form of capitalist state that has popular elections and so on.

AIW

Yes, but being against all Nationalisms is a different position to opposition to resistance. I don't support any Nationalisms but I do defend communities rights to defend themselves. This resistance is often carried out by members of organisations such as the Al-Aqsa Martyrs brigade; as in the film Arna's Children. I think solidarity with the oppressed should not be conditional on their beliefs.

i don't believe in "solidarity with the oppressed", i believe in international working class solidarity. that's not the same thing, since 'the oppressed' are very often also the oppressors - especially when framed in national rather than class terms. e.g. Al-Aqsa Martyrs Brigades also blew up Palestine Workers' Radio as mentioned in the AF pamphlet. Hamas are undoubtedly oppressed by the Israeli state, but also extrajudicially execute sex workers, homosexuals, political opponents and alleged collaborators while running a fairly oppressive mini-state of their own.

as soon as you view the world as divided fundamentally into nations (instead of or in addition to classes), such problems are inevitable as an understandable sense of solidarity with people being bombed and murdered leads to support for unsavory ruling class factions from their 'nation.' that's why this pamphlet's so good - it attacks the common sense facticity of nations per se and shows them up as ideological constructs of capitalism, opening the way for a class analysis view of such conflicts.

Boris Badenov

15 years 1 month ago

In reply to by libcom.org

Submitted by Boris Badenov on November 11, 2009

knightrose

Quote:
I disagree with your premise that Israel is a democracy. See Jewish Peace News for example.

The point is that it is a democracy. democracies are capable of being just as vile as dictatorships.

I thought the point wasn't about democracy itself, but to point out that Israel's liberal democracy is not more fascistic than that of any Western country.
People who support the "resistance" of "the oppressed" usually like to reduce everything to fascism in the hopes that this will somehow deflect attention from the great similarities between aggressive imperialism and aggressive "national front"-type guerrilla warfare (the most relevant for communists being of course that the working class is the victim of both).

As to the views expressed by AIW,
I think it's interesting to notice that all pro-resistance leftists, even those who describe themselves as internationalists, subscribe to the Middle Eeast exceptionalism theory, which sees the conflict between Israel and the nationalist Palestinian resistance as somehow completely unlike any other in the world today (rightists believe this too actually, as demonstrated recently by "Super-Zionist" Ben). The class nature of that society can't ever be anything like what there is in the West, because Western workers are only mildly exploited labour aristocrats while Palestinian workers are the victims of genocide. Such moralistic arguments ultimately put the horse before the cart. Yes it is true that Palestinian workers lead lives that are significantly more "nasty, brutish and short" than those of many Western workers, yet Palestinian workers aren't being ethnically cleansed because of the geographical and historical uniqueness of their situation, but because they live in a class society. That is the root cause of the conflict, not "islamo-fascism" or "zionazism." These are simply unfortunate misrepresentations of the conflict's appearance (which indeed sometimes does remind one of the brutality of Nazi Germany), but they only obscure its real causes.
If a Palestinian state is established tomorrow, that will not be a victory for Palestinian workers; the role of Israeli aggression will simply be taken over by Hamas zealots, and their friends in the wider jihadist movement, and Fatah nationalists. I really don't believe fewer people will die. Random blitzkriegs by the IDF will likely cease, but the death toll will remain constant. Did fewer people die after Pakistan and India separated? On the contrary.
Did Algeria become more democratic after the FLN won? No, it became a one-party police state.
If only the supporters of Palestinian nationalism would look at what national liberation has actually achieved throughout history, they would perhaps realize that the state is always violent and murderous. To conflate the struggle of workers with that of nationalists and to accuse those who support the former but not the latter of "sectarianism" is the same as asking "When have you stopped beating your wife?" It is short-sighted, disingenuous and blatantly ignorant.

Steven.

15 years 1 month ago

In reply to by libcom.org

Submitted by Steven. on November 12, 2009

Vlad, one comment I made when I originally read this pamphlet was that it was quite lacking in terms of factual demonstrations of what it's saying. How would you feel about may be putting together a couple of case studies of those "victorious" national liberation struggles you mention and what the consequences for workers in those countries have been? I really think that would be an excellent addition to the pamphlet, not to mention this site and the internationalist argument as a whole.

Joseph Kay

15 years 1 month ago

In reply to by libcom.org

Submitted by Joseph Kay on November 12, 2009

what are the 'national liberations' claimed as successes by leftists? it would be good to take on their strongest arguments rather than Mugabe or whatever. i'd guess Cuba, Vietnam, Algeria... Venezuela? i only really talk to leftists while doing practical stuff so which far-off regimes they have a hard-on for doesn't really come up.

baboon

15 years 1 month ago

In reply to by libcom.org

Submitted by baboon on November 12, 2009

I think it worth remembering that more Palestinians have been killed by Arab regimes than by Israel. My position is against all nations, proto-states (would-be nations) and resistances. All the "resistances" during WWII were cogs in nationalist or imperialist interests.
The state of Israel was based on such "resistance" and AIW makes an interesting link as to how Zionism was willing to align itself with Nazism, primarily to confront British imperialism.

Khawaga

15 years 1 month ago

In reply to by libcom.org

Submitted by Khawaga on November 13, 2009

baboon

The state of Israel was based on such "resistance" and AIW makes an interesting link as to how Zionism was willing to align itself with Nazism, primarily to confront British imperialism.

They were willing to align themselves with anyone. They realized that they needed a major imperial backer to establish a state in historical Palestine. They talked to "all" the major powers about this.

AIW

15 years 1 month ago

In reply to by libcom.org

Submitted by AIW on November 25, 2009

The following award winning film illustrates the situation in the West Bank in by setting it in London. This shows the effect of an extreme case of borders on working class people.
No Way Through
You don't need to be soft on Israel to be an Anarchist.

Yorkie Bar

15 years 1 month ago

In reply to by libcom.org

Submitted by Yorkie Bar on November 25, 2009

AIW

You don't need to be soft on Israel to be an Anarchist.

No one here is. Show me one example of any poster on this site being 'soft on Israel'.

It's obvious that you're locked into a false dichotomy where the only options are supporting either Israel or supporting Palestine. The correct answer is c none of the above.

~J.

AIW

15 years 1 month ago

In reply to by libcom.org

Submitted by AIW on November 26, 2009

I can see that to say "none of the above" can be ideologically correct. Progressive politics though should be based not only on theory , but also on practice. I would be very surprised to be told that this pamphlet was written by anyone who has acted with the ISM; it seems to have little understanding of the situation in Palestine. I urge the authors to visit Palestine for themselves, not so much to promote their ideas as to challenge them.

If you are claiming that the AF hasn't been involved with anti-war activity around Israel/Palestine you are badly uninformed, as we've been heavily involved in demonstrations and occupations and have had members visit Palestine with the ISM.

Israeli Minister Efraim Eitam called Palestinian citizens of Israel a "ticking bomb" and a "cancer".

Orwell wrote:

he word FASCISM has now no meaning except in so far as it signifies “something not desirable.”

Django wrote:

Fascism is a pretty specific kind of politics though and a kind of society its pretty easy to identify - a one party state, a corporatist system, a dictator figure, extreme nationalism, myths of national decline, etc. Israel on the other hand is a liberal democracy, and is as brutal as other liberal democracies when it come to warfare. The odd rightwing populist cabinet member doesn't change that.

That is the assumption that underlies this pamphlet and that is why I disagree with it. I did not mean to suggest that anyone should support Nationalism. Supporting peoples rights to defend themselves and to return to farms they have been ethnically cleansed from is not supporting Nationalism. Pretending; as Freedom Press does; that those farms were irrigated from the desert by anarchists; is.

Khawaga

15 years 1 month ago

In reply to by libcom.org

Submitted by Khawaga on November 26, 2009

I've been with the ISM twice and I am in almost 100 percent agreement with the AF on this (and I was in touch with Django while they were writing it, although my input was minimal at best). If you've actually read it you would see that the the AF does in fact support the struggles of the West Bank villages. These struggles, however, are livelihood struggles. The demands of villages like Bil'in, Na'lin and Biddu (and Budrus where the villagers actually won their struggle) are all about being able to make a living.

Fascism vs. democracy. What the pamphlet is saying is that both are simply incarnations of capitalist management systems of the nation-state. In cases of conflict they act in just the same way. Israel is a liberal democracy by most definitions (and it is only for that reason that Budrus got their land back, thanks to the Israeli liberal justice system), just as the UK and US. This does not stop any of these states acting like the most vicious totalitarian states in the countries they've occupied.

Submitted by Tojiah on November 26, 2009

AIW

Israeli Minister Efraim Eitam called Palestinian citizens of Israel a "ticking bomb" and a "cancer".

You do realize that Efraim Eitam is no longer a minister, and was only in the government between 2002 to 2004, and wasn't very prominent even then? If anyone's out of the loop, it's you. Honestly, if you want a slide into direct fascism, you need look no farther than today's Foreign Minister, Avigdor Lieberman, whose rejected proposal for demanding that citizens be required to sign an oath of fealty or their civil rights will be revoked has been a major part of his election campaign.
I live in Israel, I follow the news, including the alternative sources, and have personally been to the West Bank on a few occasions, and I have seen nothing to "challenge" this pamphlet - on the contrary, my experience seems to confirm it. It would be nice if you had any material objections to it, rather than questioning the worldliness of its writers.

Farce

15 years 1 month ago

In reply to by libcom.org

Submitted by Farce on November 26, 2009

BigLittleJ

Show me one example of any poster on this site being 'soft on Israel'.

Benyamin? :p

Joseph Kay

15 years 1 month ago

In reply to by libcom.org

Submitted by Joseph Kay on November 26, 2009

nope, he had a hard on for Israel ;)

Red Marriott

15 years 1 month ago

In reply to by libcom.org

Submitted by Red Marriott on November 27, 2009

There's plenty on post-apartheid South Africa, eg; http://libcom.org/library/south-africa-now-then
Algeria is another good example; http://libcom.org/library/algeria-2001-ulach-smah-no-forgiveness

AIW

15 years ago

In reply to by libcom.org

Submitted by AIW on December 11, 2009

The Pamphlet asserts:

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.

Ronnie Kasrils helped run the UK operation for the ANC in the late 60's and 70's, helping establish underground units in South Africa from the United Kingdom. In the 80's he went to serve in the ANC's Politico-Military Council and later run their campaigns section. After the fall of apartheid he went on to serve as a minister in Nelson Mandela’s first ANC government. He was asked "How decisive was the boycott?" of South African goods:

"The boycott was incredibly decisive, it put its weight behind the whole struggle. In times you will find in any struggle that one element might be higher and another element might be lower. There were times in South Africa, you remember the Rivonia arrests - Mandela and everybody fighting for their lives in the courts, etc. After that, our people were incredibly intimidated, organisations had been smashed, the underground was smashed. It took many years to recover. It took many years, nearly a decade, for the workers strike movement to come to the fore back in South Africa. And I can tell you in that period, real difficult period, when our people heard of Irish shop assistants going on a strike, refusing to handle South African goods, it came as a tremendous inspiration! So we cannot under rate the role of international solidarity."

Please follow the link before reacting that we do not see a utopia in South Africa; I agree that there is still Apartheid in South Africa but this is not a reason to oppose solidarity. The link also includes arguments from Omar Barghouti; a founding member of Palestinian Campaign for Boycott, Divestment and Sanctions; that there is documented ethnic cleansing; and from Tarek Mustafa, "The strike leader of Egypt's first independent trade union".

Tojiah

15 years ago

In reply to by libcom.org

Submitted by Tojiah on December 11, 2009

So the boycott gave moral support to the ANC in its time of trouble. Now the ANC is at the head of a state under which working-class blacks are doing even worse than under apartheid and which was asking the same white rich who fled the country when apartheid was overturned to come back in.

Aside from moral support to a specific resistance group which later turned master itself, what tangible help was the boycott to black (or any) South Africans?

Jason Cortez

15 years ago

In reply to by libcom.org

Submitted by Jason Cortez on December 11, 2009

AIW

workers strike movement to come to the fore back in South Africa. And I can tell you in that period, real difficult period, when our people heard of Irish shop assistants going on a strike, refusing to handle South African goods, it came as a tremendous inspiration!

I think you find that this is a form of workers solidarity, and whilst it is fine to called it a boycott, this term generally refers to consumer boycotts which are different things altogether.

danielmang

15 years ago

In reply to by libcom.org

Submitted by danielmang on December 14, 2009

Hi

I think the pamphlet is pretty good in historicizing and explaining the rise of the nation state and nationalism. And I really appreciate your principled opposition to the nation form and your critique of national liberation.

Unfortunately you write as if you were completely gender blind. The
only time you really mention gender is at the end of the second Gaza
statement, and then only to refer to it along with race as a division
of the working class to be overcome.
I find it entirely unacceptable to speak of the necessary unity of the
global working class (a goal I agree with) without, for example,
mentioning the ugly fact that one half of that class has a tendency to
rape, beat and kill members of the other half on a daily basis,
worldwide. And that this behavior is not just the result of some kind
of cultural backwardness but part of a very successful male strategy
of extracting unpaid domestic labor, emotional support and sexual
services from women.
I am convinced that this kind of genderblind, nonfeminist class
struggle anarchism will never get us anywhere.

The other point I would make is that I kind of miss a discussion of
how to deal with the pain that people feel who are denigrated because
of their ethnicity or nationality or "race", as migrants or as members
of minorities. For me that is a central question: how to address
national/ethnic/racist humiliation and oppression, the need to feel ok
about where you are from and what you are etc, while criticizing
processes of national, ethnic, "racial" identification. I think it
makes a difference whether you reject national identification as a
member of a "successful" nation (with all the privileges that this
entails), especially if you live in the nation state you supposedly
belong to, or as a member of a "second-class" nation, especially if
you are "not at home". These issues of speaking position have to be
worked through and I believe radicals who are privileged in terms of
ethnicity, nation, "race" etc need to come up with more than a simple
rhetoric of class struggle universalism if they want to be convincing.
I am absolutely not suggesting that white Western radicals should
romanticize people of color and stop criticizing subaltern
nationalisms and ethnic chauvinisms. But my experience is that
anarchist groups in France and in Germany (I don't know about AF UK)
are mostly all-white male-dominated clubs where people tend to not ask
themselves too many questions about their own internalized racism (and
sexism), and about whether there is maybe something in their culture
and style of organizing that discourages people of color from
joining...

Cheers

Daniel

jesuithitsquad

15 years ago

In reply to by libcom.org

Submitted by jesuithitsquad on December 14, 2009

the ugly fact that one half of that class has a tendency to
rape, beat and kill members of the other half on a daily basis,
worldwide.

wow. just wow.

Steven.

15 years ago

In reply to by libcom.org

Submitted by Steven. on December 15, 2009

exactly, you wouldn't generalise about an ethnic group like that, because it would be stupid and obviously racist, so how can you generalise about an entire gender like that?

schalomlibertad

15 years ago

In reply to by libcom.org

Submitted by schalomlibertad on December 15, 2009

you wouldn't generalise about an ethnic group like that, because it would be stupid and obviously racist, so how can you generalise about an entire gender like that?

an exaggeration, yes, but false, no. most forms of gender oppression occur in more subtle ways, and gender inequality occurs in structured forms of the economy. you know this. i think the comment was meant to bring attention to this absence. hope the exaggeration doesn't prevent one from addressing the legitimate comment.

Joseph Kay

15 years ago

In reply to by libcom.org

Submitted by Joseph Kay on December 15, 2009

schalomlibertad

i think the comment was meant to bring attention to this absence.

the thing is, it's a pamphlet on nationalism, so criticising it for not addressing a different subject is a bit random. i'm not an AF member, but they have paid a lot of attention to gender, including dedicating an issue of their quarterly magazine Organise to it.

danielmang

15 years ago

In reply to by libcom.org

Submitted by danielmang on December 17, 2009

Hello

I did try to make two points, one about gender and one about how to address
national/ethnic/racist humiliation and oppression.

Concerning the gender point, I admit that my criticism is "random" in the sense that it regularly has to be made of most theoretical productions of mixed radical groups.

I would disagree that theoretical antifeminism or gender blindness is "a different subject" that does not need to be addressed in a pamphlet on nationalism.

But my intention was not to put down the piece, like I said I thought the pamphlet was pretty good, but from my point of view discussing nation and nationalism in gender neutral terms is not a truly radical analysis.

Cheers

Daniel

PS

Here's a bibliographical tip for the curious...

Gender and Nation
Nira Yuval-Davis
London: Sage Publications
1997
0 8039 8663 7 (hb); 0 8039 8664 5 (pb)
£12.95 (pb)
x + 157 pp.

Nira Yuval-Davis' book, Gender and Nation offers a comprehensive treatment of key issues which relate to gender, nation, and nationalism. It is an insightful and highly readable theoretical work which incorporates the most recent literature on these issues. The author begins by making a few key points about gender and nationalism: firstly, that most of the major theoretical treatments of nationalism in the social sciences (eg. by Anderson, Gellner, Hobsbawm and Greenfeld) have not taken gender into account as part of the analysis, and have tended to emphasize hegemonic western nationalisms to the exclusion of non-western nationalisms; secondly, in light of the omission of a gender analysis in this literature, she points out that nationalisms are always gendered (although not always and everywhere in the same way). In making this point, she cites the works of Balibar, Chatterjee and Mosse as exceptions to the 'gender-blind theorizations of nationalisms' (p. 3). Finally, she states that 'nationalist projects' are sharply differentiated in her book from 'nation-states', and calls attention to the fact that different 'nations' can and do exist within, across, and above the entities of nation-states, and that they rarely have a direct correspondence with these entities.

In the introduction of the book, Yuval-Davis provides an overview of recent theoretical literature on the topics of gender, nation, states and nationalism, and follows with chapters on the biological and cultural reproduction of the nation (in which women figure prominently); the issues of citizenship, military and wars, and ethnicity. She applies a gender analysis to each topic, while taking into account the different social positions of women in terms of class, race, ethnicity, culture and country.

Indeed, the author stresses throughout the book the importance of avoiding the placement of women in an overarching category of 'woman', a practice which does not consider the significant differences among them. Moreover, in a critique of 'identity politics', Yuval-Davis also warns of the fallacy of viewing groups (gender, race, ethnic, class, and so forth) as homogenous entities which tend to produce a specific type of 'representative' of the collectivity, and has the effect of essentializing and reifying the group in a way that denies different experiences and positionings within it. One example of this is a view of the 'nation' as a de facto masculine entity, a view which does not address the differential position of women within it, or subsumes it to the interests of the (male) nation. Another example she cites relates to differences among women: the case of elite women serving as "representatives" of women's interests - not only in terms of privileged western women speaking for all women, but also, of privileged women from less-developed nations speaking for all of the women in their countries.

Having called attention to what may be taken as the insurmountable differences among women, the author devotes the last chapter to a discussion of the direction a feminist politics might take to work its way out of the 'postmodern' conundrum of particularized interests and unreconcilable differences - a situation which would seem to preclude any basis for a united women's struggle for equality. Her prescription is a call for a 'transversal' political strategy which highlights 'dialogue' among women in different social positions (including those within different 'identity blocs'). A dialogue of 'transversalism' she contends, is differentiated from both 'universalism'" and 'relativism', but is one which allows women the possibility for better understanding each other's specific oppressions. This may then lead to coalitions and political efforts around single issues about which women with different memberships and identities can agree. While cautioning that this type of political strategy may not always work where differences in interests are too great, Yuval-Davis nevertheless believes that this may be the most fruitful strategy to move beyond the pitfalls of identity politics, while providing a means to recognize some common ground for political action among differently-situated women. In this way, the author offers a strategy worth considering amidst the seemingly impassable identity boundaries of postmodern existence.

Joseph Kay

15 years ago

In reply to by libcom.org

Submitted by Joseph Kay on December 17, 2009

danielmang, quoting

One example of this is a view of the 'nation' as a de facto masculine entity, a view which does not address the differential position of women withinit, or subsumes it to the interests of the (male) nation.

the pamphlet definitely doesn't do that, since far from taking the nation as a (male genfdered) given, it debunks the whole 'common sense' notion of nationhood.

danielmang, quoting

Another example she cites relates to differences among women: the case of elite women serving as "representatives" of women's interests - not only in terms of privileged western women speaking for all women, but also, of privileged women from less-developed nations speaking for all of the women in their countries.

again, this doesn't seem to apply to the pamphlet.

so what, specifically, is the problem with a 'gender-blind' critique of the nation and nationalism? i mean in any given nationalism gender will play out differently, but since the pamphlet is rejecting nationalism per se (both "hegemonic western" and "non-western") i don't see how it's relevant - it would be if they were advocating national liberation of an implictly gendered national entity, to which the quoted text would seem to more apply. now there might be something i'm overlooking, but nothing in that rather academic precis suggests what that might be.

Farce

15 years ago

In reply to by libcom.org

Submitted by Farce on December 17, 2009

It's a pretty short pamphlet, obviously it's not going to address everything. I agree that there's a complex intersection between gender and nationalism, ranging from the way that pretty much all militarism relies on an idea of masculinity to the way that Western countries have integrated a form of liberal feminism into their contemporary secular/anti-Islamic nationalism...but yeah, like I said, we can't cover anything. In our defence, as Joseph says, we do put a lot of time into discussing gender stuff; we have active women's and queer caucuses, and if you'd been at the London Bookfair this year (I'm guessing you weren't, if you live in France or Germany) we hosted a meeting there about "developing a revolutionary, class analysis of sexual orientation, gender identity and male dominance".

Tojiah

15 years ago

In reply to by libcom.org

Submitted by Tojiah on December 25, 2009

Hey, I've been asked by some Israeli anarchists to translate this piece into Hebrew. Been meaning to do it for a while, but an outside impetus finally pushed me to "action".

Anyway, what's AF policy regarding that? Would they like a copy? Would a link to the original piece either here or on the AF website be enough due diligence? Any other kind of copyright/copyleft notice?

Steven.

15 years ago

In reply to by libcom.org

Submitted by Steven. on December 25, 2009

I'm not in the AF, but I'm sure they would be very happy for you to translate it, and would wanta copy of it at the end to use for their own purposes (on their website, etc)

knightrose

15 years ago

In reply to by libcom.org

Submitted by knightrose on December 25, 2009

We'd be delighted if you translated it. We'd like a copy and we'd like a link.
All our stuff is available for anyone (revolutionary that is) to use.

Tojiah

15 years ago

In reply to by libcom.org

Submitted by Tojiah on December 25, 2009

Very good. I'm hoping that this will provide a corpus from which to generate anti-Nationalist agitation in Hebrew. Will let you know when I'm done.

Django

15 years ago

In reply to by libcom.org

Submitted by Django on December 25, 2009

Nice one tree!

Tojiah

15 years ago

In reply to by libcom.org

Submitted by Tojiah on December 25, 2009

I appreciate it, but save the accolades for when I'm done translating, and an independent Hebrew reader confirms that it's sound. :-)

Tojiah

15 years ago

In reply to by libcom.org

Submitted by Tojiah on December 27, 2009

Okay, I'm done with the initial translation. I'll have to say that there are quite a few things I would have fixed in the original pamphlet, if I had the source. In particular, it mentions the docker's strike for Enoch Powell and the Ulster Loyalists striking against Northern Ireland power-sharing like it's common knowledge, while it explains the Storming of the Bastille and the Versailles Treaty with footnotes; at least for the Hebrew readership I'm aware of, it would be the other way around. :-) Other than that, there are a few redundancies and typos. Is the AF intending to revise it anytime soon, or will that wait for the compilation of failed national liberation movements?

Steven.

15 years ago

In reply to by libcom.org

Submitted by Steven. on December 27, 2009

tree, I would e-mail them a word document with the typos marked on it if you did one.

With the footnotes, for a foreign audience, you could always add "translators note" footnotes

knightrose

15 years ago

In reply to by libcom.org

Submitted by knightrose on December 27, 2009

feel free to add explanatory footnotes. as Steven said, put in translators notes.

Jason Cortez

15 years ago

In reply to by libcom.org

Submitted by Jason Cortez on December 27, 2009

You are both assuming that TOJ feels confident about being well enough informed(noy saying you aren't TOJ ;) ) maybe a link to a couple of good articles??

Tojiah

15 years ago

In reply to by libcom.org

Submitted by Tojiah on December 27, 2009

Yeah, I was meaning to do that anyway, I was just thinking that English readers from other countries might be equally baffled by the reference to Enoch Powell.

I was actually using the PDF for translation, so I couldn't conveniently mark the typos etc. Anyway, nothing major that I recall, and I'll have plenty of work with the translation for the next few days.

Jason Cortez

15 years ago

In reply to by libcom.org

Submitted by Jason Cortez on December 27, 2009

This might be helpful http://libcom.org/forums/ireland/northern-ireland

Jason Cortez

15 years ago

In reply to by libcom.org

Submitted by Jason Cortez on December 27, 2009

And http://libcom.org/forums/thought/scabbing-racist-strikes

Tojiah

15 years ago

In reply to by libcom.org

Submitted by Tojiah on December 27, 2009

Did you just WSM link me?! I am familiar with wikipedia, you know.. :p
Thanks a bunch, but my first draft already has a translator's note about it, using information from Auntie Wiki. I'll have to add a translator's preface, too, seeing as nation, national, nationality and nationalism have occasionally confusing translations into Hebrew, and I'd have to pretty much invent a Hebrew word for internationalism (using the same pattern as from national to nationalism).

rat

15 years ago

In reply to by libcom.org

Submitted by rat on December 27, 2009

It's excellent of you to do this work treeofjudas. The AF will really appreciate having this new translation.

Tojiah

15 years ago

In reply to by libcom.org

Submitted by Tojiah on December 27, 2009

Thank you, too, for the accolades, but I won't be comfortable accepting them until it's been gainfully published. Much editing and de-stilting will have to precede that.

Caiman del Barrio

15 years ago

In reply to by libcom.org

Submitted by Caiman del Barrio on December 27, 2009

danielmang

I find it entirely unacceptable to speak of the necessary unity of the global working class (a goal I agree with) without, for example, mentioning the ugly fact that one half of that class has a tendency to rape, beat and kill members of the other half on a daily basis, worldwide. And that this behavior is not just the result of some kind of cultural backwardness but part of a very successful male strategy of extracting unpaid domestic labor, emotional support and sexual services from women.

Speaking from experience then, eh Daniel?

Male feminist is male.

Submitted by Farce on December 27, 2009

TOJ

In particular, it mentions the docker's strike for Enoch Powell and the Ulster Loyalists striking against Northern Ireland power-sharing like it's common knowledge, while it explains the Storming of the Bastille and the Versailles Treaty with footnotes; at least for the Hebrew readership I'm aware of, it would be the other way around.

That's because the former two are GREAT BRITISH history, and therefore important, whereas the latter two are foreign and therefore obscure. It's what internationalism's all about. :p
Also, as yearzero and everyone else says, thanks for doing it, it's much appreciated, please point out all typos and other errors so they can be fixed in future reprints.

Jason Cortez

15 years ago

In reply to by libcom.org

Submitted by Jason Cortez on December 28, 2009

TOJ

I am familiar with wikipedia, you know

Wikiwhat??

Tojiah

15 years ago

In reply to by libcom.org

Submitted by Tojiah on December 28, 2009

(Sorry admins, thought I was clicking "quote" rather than "report")

Jason Cortez

Wikiwhat??

Auntie Wiki, She Who Knows All and is Infallible, Amen.

AIW

14 years 12 months ago

In reply to by libcom.org

Submitted by AIW on January 5, 2010

Ret, thanks for the link about South Africa. It shows that the defeat of apartheid:

Lays the basis for the possibility of collaboration between poor whites and poor blacks, impossible under apartheid, and indeed, there have been instances of whites joining in the stone-throwing.

More recent debate on the class struggle in Israel

Tojiah

14 years 9 months ago

In reply to by libcom.org

Submitted by Tojiah on April 2, 2010

Okay, I think it's safe to say that the project I was translating for is either gone or no longer interested. The website now points to a collection in English, and the texts in Hebrew that used to be there can't be found.

So, if anyone is still interested in getting this published, I could use some help with the editing, or I'll slowly go over it myself and then submit it wherever.

posi

14 years 8 months ago

In reply to by libcom.org

Submitted by posi on April 29, 2010

A critical review of the pamphlet:

http://thecommune.wordpress.com/2010/04/29/the-earth-is-not-flat-a-review-of-against-nationalism/

Spikymike

10 years ago

In reply to by libcom.org

Submitted by Spikymike on December 17, 2014

The review mentioned and linked above by posi is of course available on this site as in the 'related listing' and the subject of much further discussion there.

Spikymike

9 years 2 months ago

In reply to by libcom.org

Submitted by Spikymike on October 17, 2015

Django later responded to some of the criticsm of an otherwise still excellent pamphlet here:
http://libcom.org/blog/some-more-thoughts-national-question-17012012
Not sure if these were picked up in any revised version of the pamphlet.

Mike Harman

6 years 10 months ago

In reply to by libcom.org

Submitted by Mike Harman on March 5, 2018

I re-read this and Django's follow-up a while back. I think this section could really use revision with reference to some concrete struggles:

AF

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 20th 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.

Spent the past year or two slowly filling in some gaps in knowledge about class struggle in Sub-Saharan Africa between 1945 and 1961-ish - 1955-65 being the decade that the bulk of states were granted independence in some sense or another.

https://libcom.org/blog/post-war-strike-wave-sub-saharan-africa-02032018

A few things from this:

- the mass strikes (tens or hundreds of thousands of works, daily mass meetings of thousands) happened in multiple West and East African colonial territories

- they have been almost entirely written out of the history of 'national liberation movements', both by the nationalist leaders themselves and the colonial administrations, but also from more or less any 'left'/communist/anarchist account.

- however they were generally against colonialism - in the sense they were often strikes by colonial state employees (nationally owned mines and railways), coming into conflict with colonial police and armed forces, by people who generally wanted an end to colonialism.

- they were often not supported by nationalist politicians, not Kenyatta, not Nyerere

- some strikes were supported by nationalist politicians like Nkrumah's 'positive action' campaign in Ghana - but then when the same people in the same industries went on strike after independence, they got threatened with state security forces.

- organisers of these strike movements such as Makhan Singh in some cases had an explicit communist ideology (I haven't read much on Makhan Singh yet so I don't know exactly what type) https://libcom.org/library/singh-makhan-1913-1973 but apart from some syndicalist unions (there was definitely one in Algeria, maybe to some extent in East Africa but the unions got banned then resurrected on a British model with help from the TUC) there were not necessarily explicit communist politics organised outside the nationalist parties.

- an aspect of many of these strike movements (especially in Kenya, also in Guyana in South America in the early-'70s when it was post-colonial) was to break down both tribal and racial divisions (between Kikuyu and Kamba, and between black Africans and South Asians), and also divisions between countries - they broke out of a national framework in ways that only sometimes happen in Europe too.

There are some questions that really are not answered, and which I think leave the ground open for pro-national liberation tendencies to capitalise on the weaknesses:

- are mass strikes of hundreds of thousands of workers organised by daily mass meetings of thousands something we support? Obviously yes, but without examples this is not clear.

- are they excluded from the 'national liberation movement' because they are strikes against the state, rather than movements to create a new state, even though they are in direct conflict with the colonial administration and in some cases have a specific demand for it to go? This is a much harder question to answer, although I think a start can be made with a distinction between anti-colonial (in the purely negative sense of being against the colonial state) and national liberation (in the sense of being for a national state).

- a lot of workers on strike would have had nationalist ideas (in that they wanted the British, as represented concretely by colonial bureaucracy, army, police, settler farmers out of Kenya) - but they did not necessarily have more nationalist ideas than workers in the US in '43 or Hungary 1956, or Paris '68 (or the Lindsey strikes) etc. so the question is to what extent did those ideas shape the class struggle and limit it, not that workers were especially nationalist

- There are broadly two arguments against nationalism - a humanist one that it can lead to chauvinism, and a practical one that it binds the interests of competing classes together and can redirect or demobilise class struggle towards the interests of a new ruling class. Fanon talked about the first one in Wretched of the Earth (the pitfalls of nationalism) but not really the second so much, the article talks about both, but it's not always clear which.

- The article is mostly aimed at communists in the US and Europe and their support or non-support for nationalist movements elsewhere, but by doing so it elides the above questions of the relationship of workers under colonialism to nationalist parties and post-colonial states. i.e. is our main issue that Trots and Tankies have awful politics where they support reactionary states because they're 'anti-imperialist', or is it trying to learn from the history of class struggle where nationalism and colonialism were major issues, and trying to identify a way to relate to past and present proletarians that have to deal with this. If we're able to do that successfully, I think it does more to undermine the bad trot and tankie positions than just pointing out how bad they are.

- how do we as anarchists and internationalist communists relate to guerrilla warfare (such as the KLFA, or for that matter the Black Liberation Army in the US). I think the KLFA was mostly a reaction to the state of emergency and banning of unions, mass meetings etc, and the BLA was in large part a response to the COINTELPRO programme's targeting and assassination open organisers like Fred Hampton and others. It's quite possible to critique the politics of those groups and point out that it marks a retreat due to state repression rather than an advance, but if we support armed self-defense of workers (obvious example being the Battle of Blair Mountain) then it's not an argument against those tactics in principle. This is not the same as promoting an insurrectionist position, just that simply 'armed struggle' is a form rather than a content as such.

- there should probably also be some discussion of how people who were involved in national liberation movements that were 'successful' related to the failures of those movements to transform society. It's often framed as neo-colonialism - formal independence but with economic relations to the former colonialist state unchanged. Can we compare that to ultra-left concepts like Wildcat Germany's 'global working class' https://libcom.org/library/global-working-class-wildcat-germany. This would mean properly critiquing perspectives that came out of Pan-Africanism (Fanon, CLR James, Walter Rodney, later Nkrumah when he talked about class struggle and others) rather than Trot and Tankie groups that would ignore their criticisms of national liberation in favour of regurgitating half-baked Lenin. Similarly with Vietnam, are we talking about Americans shouting Ho Chi Minh in 1969, or Ho Chi Minh massacring Vietnamese Trotskyists in 1945?