Nationalists Against Workers

Nationalism has often been hostile to the cause of labour. This was particularly clear in the case of Ireland. Daniel ‘the Liberator’ O'Connell revered as one of the founders of Irish nationalism was a consistent enemy of the working class. He voted against a bill to limit the hours children under the age of 9 could be employed in factories and limiting those under the age of 13 to a 48 hour week. He stated that it infringed the rights of industry and condemned the "...ridiculous humanity, which would end by converting their manufacturers into beggars" and declared "There was no tyranny equal to that which was exercised by the trade unionists in Dublin over their fellow labourers. " He supported the rights of property and prevented the spread of Chartism in Ireland, "I shall ever rejoice that I kept Ireland free from this pollution." During the Famine years his son pronounced "I thank God I live among a people who would die of hunger rather than defraud their landlords of rent."

Charles Parnell also feared that the working class. He believed that the growth of Trade Unions would "Frighten the capitalist liberals and lead them to believe that a parliament in Dublin might be used for furthering some kind of socialism. You ought to know that neither the Irish priests or the farmers would support such principles."

The Ancient Order of Hibernians, a catholic version of the Orange Order, shared its opposition to socialism. It was involved in anti-trade union activity in Dublin and Cork where it drove Connolly out of Cobh/Queenstown. It published the pamphlet 'Socialism: A warning to the workers'.
Arthur Griffith’s Sinn Fein wrote of the strikes of 1911 that "Against the Red Flag of Communism...we raise the flag of an Irish nation. Under that flag will be protection, safety and freedom for all." Which, of course, they meant the businessmen and merchants.

During the 1913 Dublin Lockout employers led by William Murphy locked out tens of thousands of members of the Syndicalist ITGWU in order to smash the union. During the lockout the Irish Times of the 4th October observed, "Today Mr Murphy's press and the official Nationalist press are at one in condemning Larkinism." (Larkinism is defined by historian Emmet O'Connor as “a workerist mentality, a technique in conflict based on sympathetic action, and a broad ambition to promote class solidarity").

The class struggle is not an invention of the socialists, but the very substance of the facts and acts of history in the making that are daily taking place under our eyes. Nationalist ideas promotes the idea that people are "all in this together" and ignores these class divisions in society and argues that independence, without breaking from capitalism would be a solution to problems that fundamentally are a product of capitalism i.e private/state ownership of wealth and the means to produce wealth in society. Even James Connolly had to expose such naivity before he too made the ill-judged decision to participate in the nationalist putsch that was the 1916 Easter Rising.
“If you remove the English army to-morrow and hoist the green flag over Dublin Castle, unless you set about the organisation of the Socialist Republic your efforts would be in vain. England would still rule you. She would rule you through her capitalists, through her landlords, through her financiers, through the whole array of commercial and individualist institutions she has planted in this country....”

Nationalism’s function is to persuade people to be loyal to a state. Governments use nationalism to make people think that they are not just obeying a particular group of men - the government - but perfoming their ‘loyal duty’ to the nation. We're bombarded almost daily with the media’s message that we belong to a nation and that this nation must compete with other nations. Workers have often been asked to accept cuts in wages and services, or participation in wars, but never for the benefit of capitalism, always for the benefit of the nation and “the national interest” It helps them to portray the major divisions in our society as being between different nationalities competing for jobs, resources and political dominance – rather than being between workers and employers - and to take a contrary position risks being labelled unpatriotic.There are no good and bad nationalisms. Nationalism is always an illusion. Nationalism shackles us to a particular nation-state.

Rather than strengthening the forces of socialism such a "popular front" as we currently witness of various leftists joining together with hedge fund managers for Scottish independence serves only to weaken the movement for socialism while bolstering the nationalists. The Socialist Party refuses to align ourselves either with London or Edinburgh but instead advocates workers’ unity rather than division along national lines. It has always been the bosses tried and tested strategy to divide and rule. Workers have no country. Our fight is a fight against the capitalist class who use us to maximise their profits – and against the system that is only too happy to play off one group of workers against another in the pursuit of that profit. International capital pursues its own ends with stern remorselessness. In order to lower national wages and gain greater profits, the capitalist does not hesitate to deprive his fellow-countrymen of work, to out-source jobs or import, migrant workers accustomed by greater poverty to a lower standard of living, and therefore able and willing to work for lower wages to compete with them on the labour market. For the indigenous work-force it is not to strive to prohibit them from employing foreign workers but to thwart them from paying them less than the national rate of wages is the only effective means of meeting this evil.

The socialist movement has its roots in the shared oppression experienced by all workers and the international character of the capitalist system itself. Capitalism has created a genuinely world society, where all our lives are entwined together in a common history and a common fate. Materially, socialism will build on that achievement, extending and developing our mutual solidarity with working people in every corner of the globe. Faced with the international domination of capital, the working class of all countries has come to understand the common character, the oneness, of their own interests. They are everywhere the victims of the same kind of exploitation, due everywhere to the same cause. The same facts have suggested to them the same demands, the same means and tactics to attain the same goal. International exploitation has thus given birth to an ever growing international solidarity among the workers who resist its encroachments. World capitalism will only be transformed into a different world through the global actions of workers.
Whether or not the revolution arrives, the challenge for socialists consists in educating our fellow workers, in rendering them conscious of their condition, their task and their responsibility, of organising them in readiness for the day when the political power shall fall into their hands. To win for socialism the greatest possible number of supporters, that is the task to which socialist parties must devote their efforts, using all peaceful and legal means. In today’s times any sort of action except peaceful and legal is sure to have a detrimental influence on the spread of socialist ideas.