It is disappointing for the members of the World Socialist Movement to accept but socialism, as an ideology, has failed to dislodge the ideological influence of nationalism and religion. Countries are closing their borders to the rising number of people fleeing poverty, human rights abuse, violence and climate change. Governments all over the world are increasingly preventing, discouraging and rebuffing attempts of men, women and children to enter their territories. Far too many of our fellow workers are heeding the politicians’ simplistic slogan “go away” as the solution to their own problems. It is the language of hate, not humanity. We cannot continue with the inward-looking “go-it-alone” nationalist and nativist perspective.
Nationalism is at the top of the list of political illusions used to blinker working people. This obsession with patriotism is one that socialists confront all the time.
We face it from the left-wing as much as from the right-wing. The Left pays lip service to the idea of workers of the world uniting yet support all manner of nationalisms.
Many of our fellow-workers whose frustration about the poverty and indignity of working-class life often leads them to a nationalist cause which would do them no more good than it did all the other workers who earlier won independence and gained the right to be exploited by local capitalists instead of foreign ones.
We do not own very much of any country, so why should we care which section of the robber class owns which portion of the world?
Workers have a world to win, not nations to sacrifice for.
The World Socialist Movement does not take sides in the rivalries between national capitalism and global capitalism. We are against capitalism in all its various forms.
The World Socialist Movement stands for a united world society, a cooperative commonwealth. Our aim is to create a world free from all national divisions. We want to abolish borders, not establish new ones.
All nationalist movements arise from a confused desire to see a united community. The aspiration to have land which belongs to you is in reality a desire to have a society that is yours — which you can feel a part of because it belongs to you.
These are really movements of alienated workers who want a society which they can call their own. Workers are right to want a society which we can call our own: a planet that belongs to humanity and local areas which we can take pride in as people who are no longer the tenants in a capitalist-owned world.
To workers who are obsessed with nationalism, the World Socialist Movement appeals with all of the passion which the nationalists use: Come, let us unite as a class which has everything in common, everything to gain, a variety of cultures to develop — let us, indeed, have the world for the workers.
Working people must free themselves from the shackles of nationalism and tackle their class problems on the basis of socialist understanding.
Nationalism is a camouflage that disguises the real aims and interests of the ruling class of the major capitalist countries and is a hindrance to the development of a socialist movement.
International solidarity and comradeship for a socialist world may seem at the moment a long way off, but it must come if we are to survive.
The World Socialist Movement recognises the urgent need to resolve the climate change crises. Government leaders are fiddling while the planet burns. People have to understand the cause of global warming. We present no easy answer to the problem of carbon emissions and we offer no reforms to mitigate it effects because climate change is wedded to the operation of the capitalist system, based on private ownership of the means of production, and the drive for profit, which is the source of the problem. The social relations of capitalism are based, in the final analysis, on buying and selling.
Capitalism is the impersonal process of the accumulation of capital out of the surplus-value produced by the working class and involves competition to transform this surplus-value into money by selling the products in which it is embodied. This battle is won by those enterprises that can sell their products at the lowest price due to their employment of more productive methods. This investment in new productive methods depends on making enough profits (converting enough surplus value into money). So, capitalism is the pursuit of profits to accumulate as more capital. Such “growth” is built into it and cannot be stopped. If ever it was, the whole system would seize up and there would by massive worldwide economic crises. What is required to stabilise the rise in temperature is a global political and social revolution to end capitalism and put “mankind” in full charge of its interaction with the rest of nature (production). Which can only be done on the basis of the Earth’s natural and industrial resources becoming the common heritage of all humanity. To this end, the WSM is organised.
1) If we do have a chance of survival, it is contingent on the establishment of world socialism. If capitalism continues indefinitely, then sooner or later, we will be doomed.
2) The quicker we establish socialism the better. But better late than never.
3) The climatic and environmental threat to human survival will come to occupy a central place among the concerns that inspire people to work for socialism, overshadowing all else.
A world socialist community of one humanity will focus human effort upon the problem much more effectively than a world still split into rival nations and riven by class and other divisions. A socialist community would be much better placed than a profit-driven system to minimise and mitigate the misery and suffering which will be caused by global warming.
The message of socialism is worldwide and it spreads across the artificial national boundaries erected by mankind to reach the ears of every worker.
There is but one hope and is to join with the World Socialist Movement to make common cause with the fellow-workers of all lands for the end of all forms of exploitation and saying to the capitalists: “A plague on all of you.”
The WSM holds to the following principles:
1. Opposition to all forms of capitalism (past and present, local and global, state-managed or ‘free market’);
2. Its replacement by a class-free, money-free world community without frontiers or states and based upon:
3. Common ownership and direct democratic control of the means of production;
4. A free access ‘use’ economy with production geared towards the satisfaction of human needs;
5. Voluntary association, cooperation and the maximisation of human creativity, dignity and freedom;
6. A recognition that such an alternative society can only be established democratically from the ‘bottom up’ by the vast majority of people, without the intervention of politicians or ‘vanguard’ parties.
The World Socialist Movement hopes to achieve a worldwide network of individuals and groups united by our opposition to capitalism and the State. The purpose of the World Socialist Movement is to help inspire a vision of an alternative way of living where all the world’s resources are owned in common and democratically controlled by communities on an ecologically sustainable and socially harmonious basis. The World Socialist Movement offers a vision of the world – one where nation-states and their national boundaries disappear.
We are standing on the very threshold of a post-scarcity one-world. All we have to do is take one step.
