Workers have no country and patriotism is a delusion and nationalism is a snare. Working people have no country of their own. Their land is the property of a master class and the worker rarely owns enough for his or her coffin. What matters is the name of the country of your birth, if you are a slave in that country? Patriotism requires allegiance to the flag, which means obedience and readiness to kill another father, mother, brother, or sister.

When hands clasp across national boundaries in solidarity the workers will know that borders and nations have no meaning or significance for them. These two, nationalism and international socialism (and there can be no socialism that is not international) are opposite as the poles, as antagonistic as fire and water. When patriotism and socialism enter the worker’s mind, patriotism will be quenched or socialism will evaporate. The socialist patriot is an impossibility. If any is loyal to those in the class that exploits, he or she is a traitor to our own class. Workers own no country, so why should we care which section of the class of thieves owns which national portion? Workers have a world to win, not nations to fight for.

Patriotism groups men and women according to their land of origin, as decided by the vicissitudes of history; within every country, thanks to the patriotic link, rich and poor unite against the foreigner. Socialism, in contrast, groups all people, poor against rich, class against class, without taking into account the differences of race and language, and over and above the frontiers determined by the fortunes and misfortunes of history.

The Socialist Party are anti-patriots but let it be clearly understood that that love of one’s native village or familiarity with a town is not the type of patriotism to be condemned. What we denounce are jingoism and nationalism, that is not natural sentiments, but prejudices very firmly implanted into the heads of people. We, who hate the existing nation-states, retain a soft little spot for where we were born and raised. Neither have we ever maintained that there are not, throughout the existing nations, some noticeable differences of character and temperament such as have been caused by history and culture. Countries have had their raison d’être at a time and the best proof of it is that they were born and that they have endured; we even think that their existence, at certain periods and in certain circumstances, may even have contributed to the general improvement of our species. True patriotism seeks the welfare of each in the happiness of all. One time in the past the term patriot meant to be opposed to the governing class of your country in the interests of the people of your country. Patriotism consisted in opposing the powers that were against the interests of the people. Patriotism has now lost that meaning in small communities where once the cohesive principle of all for each and each for all had significance. When workers are primarily concerned with the direction of their own affairs, managing their own work-place and running their own communities and neighbourhoods, independent for practical purposes, distant territorial claims for allegiance will not easily find a “patriotic” echo

 Patriotism assumes that our planet is divided into little regions, each one surrounded by a wall and an iron gate. Those who have had the fortune of being born inside these walls consider themselves better than those living outside. Such a belief poison the minds of the children and if need be the sacrifice of children in wars. The Socialist Party finds nothing reasonable to inspire any of our fellow-workers in the thought that they are slaves of one governmental system run by their masters rather than another and a rival one. Hence our adoption of the slogan “Proletarians of all lands unite.”

Let us do away with nationalism, patriotism and national chauvinism altogether and substitute in its place the “ internationalism” of the class-conscious worker. It is not a question of fighting for the political independence of one nation, but for a new society for all lands – for the socialist commonwealth.

 “Women are the creatures of an organised tyranny of men, as workers are the creatures of an organised tyranny of idlers.” – Eleanor Marx

Half of working-age women are providing an average of 45 hours of unpaid care every week, while a quarter of men do17 hours.

Every year women in the UK are providing 23.2bn hours of unpaid childcare care worth an estimated £382bn, while men provide 9.7bn worth £160bn, according to the thinktank Centre for Progressive Policy.

Calling unpaid work “one of the driving forces of gender-based inequalities in the workplace”, the CPP found that caring responsibilities “disproportionately impact women and exacerbate workplace inequality”.

Almost half of working-age women in UK do 45 hours of unpaid care a week – study (yahoo.com)

The government’s export credit agency, UK Export Finance (UKEF), has provided  £5.24bn in a combination of loans and guarantees in the past three years to overseas energy and infrastructure projects linked to labour abuses and environmental damage.

Since 2019, UKEF has allocated money to projects with the potential to cause “significant adverse environmental and/or social impacts” in countries across the Middle East, Africa and Asia. Oil refineries, power stations, and a large-scale liquified natural gas (LGN) project are among the high-risk “Category A projects”, to receive funding recently.

Despite recommendations to mitigate labour abuses, six migrant workers employed on Middle Eastern projects backed by UKEF have revealed low pay, safety hazards, excessive working hours, and the denial of freedom of movement as persistent issues.

“UKEF financing is very specific and usually funds very big, very damaging infrastructure projects,” said Daniel Willis, policy and campaigns manager at campaign group Global Justice Now. “Human rights considerations are an afterthought, and due diligence seems to be approached as if it is just a box to tick.”

A review of an oil refinery upgrade programme in Kuwait shows that UKEF knew of worker issues before it provided a $179m (£135m) support package in 2019. Employees and contractors were commonly working more than the maximum overtime hours allowed by legislation, and 87% of workers surveyed had not received an employment contract. 

About 90% of workers at Kuwait National Petroleum Company (KNPC) had also been charged illicit recruitment fees to secure their jobs. Some were living in sub-standard accommodation with no air-conditioning, despite summer temperatures reaching 54C in Kuwait, the review said.

Gulam Siddique who recently worked as an inspector at KNPC’s refineries, told the Guardian lower-skilled labourers were not treated well. “They are treated as slaves, working 12 hours a day in direct sunlight,” said Siddique. “There are health risks for those guys, from the gases released at the plant.”

Several of the UK-backed projects are based in Middle Eastern countries, where the labourers’ freedom of movement is controlled under the kafala sponsorship system, which has been deemed abusive and exploitative by Human Rights Watch.

Britain hands billions to projects linked to labour abuse and climate damage | Global development | The Guardian

 From the March 1979 issue of the Socialist Standard

Corporate profits soared to a record high in 2021

Data from the Department of Commerce’s Bureau of Economic Analysis shows that pre-tax profits over the whole year increased by 25 percent, reaching $2.8 trillion. 

The annualized rate of profit from the fourth quarter was even higher, at $2.94 trillion.

Meanwhile, hourly wages for U.S. workers increased by about 4.7 percent last year, which is equivalent to a pay cut of about 2.4 percent.

“Clearly, mega-corporations could easily absorb the higher costs of goods and services right now,” wrote Robert Reich, former labor secretary and economics professor at University of California, Berkeley. “They’re not raising prices because they have to. They’re doing it because – with so few competitors – they can. The problem, at its core, is corporate greed.”

Tyson’s CEO told shareholders that the company it’s only raising prices on meat products in order to cover inflation costs for the company. However, it posted profits of $1 billion in the first quarter of 2022, a 48 percent raise over the same period last year.

Corporate Profits Reached Record High of Nearly $3 Trillion in 2021 (truthout.org)

Marx and Engels, in the “Communist Manifesto,” appealed to the workers of all lands to unite for the overthrow of capitalism and the inauguration of Socialism, the workers of the world still stand divided by national frontiers. Sadly, socialism has not yet been achieved and the capitalist class are still strongly entrenched in possession of property and power.

What significance has the “fatherland” or the “motherland” for the wage-slave whose only guarantee of livelihood rests on the ability to sell one’s labour-power? None! save that it receives from political superstitions inculcated and carefully nurtured by agents of the dominant class. The class-conscious worker sees that “nationalism” is a snare in the path towards emancipation. Not only does it serve to cloud the class issue within the nation, but it also hinders the workers of the world from recognising and acting up to their unity of interest. War cannot be humanised. Its brutalities will cease only when capitalism, which is the cause of wars, has been brought to an end. That demands action by the international working class, the first step towards which is that the workers in each country should accept the existence of the class struggle as the basis of their organisation and line up in opposition to their own ruling class and its government. 

When the ruling class talk of war it is more than ever necessary for the workers in this country to remember that the workers in other countries have as little direct responsibility for their callous ruling class and bloody-minded military castes as we have for ours. The best help that the workers anywhere can give to their foreign comrades is to redouble their efforts to strengthen the socialist movement in their own country and hasten the day when the workers will control the affairs of society.  

The Socialist Party intends to build a world in which there will be neither exploiters nor exploited.

The Socialist Party, while extending the hand of fraternity to the workers of all lands, must on principle refuse to ally itself with the parties of capitalism.

With another war we say now as we did in the past:

“Having no quarrel with the working class of any country, we extend to our fellow workers of all lands the expression of our goodwill and socialist fraternity, and pledge ourselves to work for the overthrow of capitalism and the triumph of socialism.”

True to our international socialist principles we seek contact with socialist workers in other countries who take their stand on the same principles, with a view to set on foot, at last, a genuine socialist International free from the national prejudices and compromise policies that up to the present have hindered the march of the workers’ movement.

The real division in the world is not between people of supposedly different “nationalities” but between two social classes both of which are international: a class of capitalists who own and control all that is in and on the Earth and a class of people who, excluded from such ownership and control. Proponents of patriotism seek to ensure the loyalty of its subjects by inculcating into them, from the cradle to the grave, the idea that they are members of a “nation” with a common interest against those of other “nations”. Socialists reject this mistaken and dangerous idea, regarding themselves not as British, Russian, Ukrainian, American or whatever but as members of the human race, as citizens of the world.

The world capitalist class are continually competing against each other. They also compete for strategic areas in order to protect the markets, trade routes, raw material sources and investment fields they have got or want. The various armed states into which the world is divided are used by rival groups of capitalists to protect and further their interests in these clashes. They represent, in other words, not the interest of the majority of their subjects, but that of the dominant section of the capitalist class established within their borders.

In these clashes of interest between the various national capitalist groups success greatly depends on the military might of the states involved. States, and the capitalists they represent, do not deliberately seek war; for them, this is often the last resort, when negotiations failed. But all states are obliged to maintain as powerful an army as they can afford, not necessarily to be used on every occasion, but to threaten and to be taken into account in the negotiations and manoeuvrings that continually arise from the underlying clashes of economic interest that are built into capitalism.

Capitalism, in other words, is a permanent powder-keg or rather, these days, a permanently-primed nuclear bomb. Its very structure as a competitive profit-seeking system generates preparations for war (and the waste this involves), the threat of war (which is ever-present) and actual wars (which are always going on somewhere in the world).

Socialism will see the abolition of frontiers and the dismantling of the various armed states into which the world is now divided. As classes will have been abolished, people really will become citizens of a united world of a class-free, money-free, state-free and leader-free world community

Marx and Engels, in the “Communist Manifesto,” appealed to the workers of all lands to unite for the overthrow of capitalism and the inauguration of Socialism, the workers of the world still stand divided by national frontiers. Sadly, socialism has not yet been achieved and the capitalist class are still strongly entrenched in possession of property and power.

What significance has the “fatherland” or the “motherland” for the wage-slave whose only guarantee of livelihood rests on the ability to sell one’s labour-power? None! save that it receives from political superstitions inculcated and carefully nurtured by agents of the dominant class. The class-conscious worker sees that “nationalism” is a snare in the path towards emancipation. Not only does it serve to cloud the class issue within the nation, but it also hinders the workers of the world from recognising and acting up to their unity of interest. War cannot be humanised. Its brutalities will cease only when capitalism, which is the cause of wars, has been brought to an end. That demands action by the international working class, the first step towards which is that the workers in each country should accept the existence of the class struggle as the basis of their organisation and line up in opposition to their own ruling class and its government. 

When the ruling class talk of war it is more than ever necessary for the workers in this country to remember that the workers in other countries have as little direct responsibility for their callous ruling class and bloody-minded military castes as we have for ours. The best help that the workers anywhere can give to their foreign comrades is to redouble their efforts to strengthen the socialist movement in their own country and hasten the day when the workers will control the affairs of society.  

The Socialist Party intends to build a world in which there will be neither exploiters nor exploited.

The Socialist Party, while extending the hand of fraternity to the workers of all lands, must on principle refuse to ally itself with the parties of capitalism.

With another war we say now as we did in the past:

“Having no quarrel with the working class of any country, we extend to our fellow workers of all lands the expression of our goodwill and socialist fraternity, and pledge ourselves to work for the overthrow of capitalism and the triumph of socialism.”

True to our international socialist principles we seek contact with socialist workers in other countries who take their stand on the same principles, with a view to set on foot, at last, a genuine socialist International free from the national prejudices and compromise policies that up to the present have hindered the march of the workers’ movement.

The real division in the world is not between people of supposedly different “nationalities” but between two social classes both of which are international: a class of capitalists who own and control all that is in and on the Earth and a class of people who, excluded from such ownership and control. Proponents of patriotism seek to ensure the loyalty of its subjects by inculcating into them, from the cradle to the grave, the idea that they are members of a “nation” with a common interest against those of other “nations”. Socialists reject this mistaken and dangerous idea, regarding themselves not as British, Russian, Ukrainian, American or whatever but as members of the human race, as citizens of the world.

The world capitalist class are continually competing against each other. They also compete for strategic areas in order to protect the markets, trade routes, raw material sources and investment fields they have got or want. The various armed states into which the world is divided are used by rival groups of capitalists to protect and further their interests in these clashes. They represent, in other words, not the interest of the majority of their subjects, but that of the dominant section of the capitalist class established within their borders.

In these clashes of interest between the various national capitalist groups success greatly depends on the military might of the states involved. States, and the capitalists they represent, do not deliberately seek war; for them, this is often the last resort, when negotiations failed. But all states are obliged to maintain as powerful an army as they can afford, not necessarily to be used on every occasion, but to threaten and to be taken into account in the negotiations and manoeuvrings that continually arise from the underlying clashes of economic interest that are built into capitalism.

Capitalism, in other words, is a permanent powder-keg or rather, these days, a permanently-primed nuclear bomb. Its very structure as a competitive profit-seeking system generates preparations for war (and the waste this involves), the threat of war (which is ever-present) and actual wars (which are always going on somewhere in the world).

Socialism will see the abolition of frontiers and the dismantling of the various armed states into which the world is now divided. As classes will have been abolished, people really will become citizens of a united world of a class-free, money-free, state-free and leader-free world community

If Russia wants to occupy and run Britain, they may have it as far as the Socialist Party is concerned. Britain doesn’t belong to the British worker. Why should our fellow workers worry about preserving what belongs to others? If the others want it, let them fight for it.

The only thing that matters is the development of a consciousness of working-class solidarity, born of an appreciation of the common cause of working-class misery and its common remedy. Socialism is the answer to every question of working-class import, and— Socialism knows no frontier. It matters nothing that Britain may be peopled by Russians, or by any other nationality on the capitalist globe. That would make no difference to the movement of the working class towards the world-embracing cooperative commonwealth. The workers of all nations make common causes against the common or capitalist exploiter.  If an invasion is coming, let it come.

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

 Patriotism is usually defined as being devoted to the land of our fathers. But which is the land of our fathers? Our fathers came from many different parts of the world. The political division of the world in which we live in an artificial entity. The land has been wrested from other peoples. The nation they call “ours” is the result of conquest over original inhabitants, and over ourselves, by successive ruling classes. Unlike the free tribespeople, we are hirelings; we possess no country. Nationality covers no real entity other than that of common oppression, a unified government. It does not comprise any unity of race, for in no nation is there one pure race, or anything like it. It does not cover a unity of language, for scarcely a nation exists in which several distinct languages are not indigenous. Nor is it any fixed territory, for this changes from decade to decade, while the inhabitants of the transferred territory have to transfer their allegiance, their patriotism, to the new nation.

 Only the whole world can now be rightly called the land of our fathers. Only in the service of the people of the whole world, and not against those of any part of it, can social cooperation find its highest and complete expression. Marx did not call upon the workers of Germany alone to unite. He appealed to the toilers of the whole world to join hands; to a whole world of labour whose, the only loss could be its national-coloured chains.

The only universal bond of nationality or patriotism that exists for us today is, then, that of subjection to a single government. Patriotism in the worker is pride in the common yoke imposed by a politically unified ruling class. Yet it is this artificial entity that we are called upon to honour before life itself. This badge of political servitude is called an object worthy of supreme sacrifice. The workers are expected to abandon all vital interests and sacrifice all they hold dear for the preservation of an artificial nationality. The workers are duped by the ruling class into sacrificing themselves for the preservation of a politico-economic yoke of a particular form and colour. Many on the left wing have fallen headlong into this trap.

Patriotism and nationalism are artificial restrictions of humanity’s sympathy and mutual aid; obstacles to the expansion of the human mind; impediments to the needful and helpful development of human unity and cooperation; as shackles that chain men and women to slavery; as incentives that set each against the other. 

If Russia wants to occupy and run Britain, they may have it as far as the Socialist Party is concerned. Britain doesn’t belong to the British worker. Why should our fellow workers worry about preserving what belongs to others? If the others want it, let them fight for it.

The only thing that matters is the development of a consciousness of working-class solidarity, born of an appreciation of the common cause of working-class misery and its common remedy. Socialism is the answer to every question of working-class import, and— Socialism knows no frontier. It matters nothing that Britain may be peopled by Russians, or by any other nationality on the capitalist globe. That would make no difference to the movement of the working class towards the world-embracing cooperative commonwealth. The workers of all nations make common causes against the common or capitalist exploiter.  If an invasion is coming, let it come.

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

 Patriotism is usually defined as being devoted to the land of our fathers. But which is the land of our fathers? Our fathers came from many different parts of the world. The political division of the world in which we live in an artificial entity. The land has been wrested from other peoples. The nation they call “ours” is the result of conquest over original inhabitants, and over ourselves, by successive ruling classes. Unlike the free tribespeople, we are hirelings; we possess no country. Nationality covers no real entity other than that of common oppression, a unified government. It does not comprise any unity of race, for in no nation is there one pure race, or anything like it. It does not cover a unity of language, for scarcely a nation exists in which several distinct languages are not indigenous. Nor is it any fixed territory, for this changes from decade to decade, while the inhabitants of the transferred territory have to transfer their allegiance, their patriotism, to the new nation.

 Only the whole world can now be rightly called the land of our fathers. Only in the service of the people of the whole world, and not against those of any part of it, can social cooperation find its highest and complete expression. Marx did not call upon the workers of Germany alone to unite. He appealed to the toilers of the whole world to join hands; to a whole world of labour whose, the only loss could be its national-coloured chains.

The only universal bond of nationality or patriotism that exists for us today is, then, that of subjection to a single government. Patriotism in the worker is pride in the common yoke imposed by a politically unified ruling class. Yet it is this artificial entity that we are called upon to honour before life itself. This badge of political servitude is called an object worthy of supreme sacrifice. The workers are expected to abandon all vital interests and sacrifice all they hold dear for the preservation of an artificial nationality. The workers are duped by the ruling class into sacrificing themselves for the preservation of a politico-economic yoke of a particular form and colour. Many on the left wing have fallen headlong into this trap.

Patriotism and nationalism are artificial restrictions of humanity’s sympathy and mutual aid; obstacles to the expansion of the human mind; impediments to the needful and helpful development of human unity and cooperation; as shackles that chain men and women to slavery; as incentives that set each against the other. 

 World Socialist Movement online meetings