Two news stories today show the peril workers face if they buy into nationalism of any kind (New York Times, May 16, 2014). Nationalism, patriotism, is a boss’s lie. In eastern Ukraine, steelworkers and miners in the companies owned by the billionnaire Rinat Akhmetov put down tools and, led by their managers, occupied their city Mariupol as militias against the pro-Russian secessionists. Akhmetov says secession will bring sanctions that will destroy his businesses and the workers’ jobs. So unity of Ukraine is this billionnaire’s slogan now and he has turned the workers into his private soldiers to enforce Ukrainian nationalism. Forget that tomorrow he might go in the opposite direction. “If you want to keep your jobs, fight for me,” the boss means.
What these workers have done is follow their boss down the path of nationalism. It delivers them into the bosses’ hands, and not just in the obvious sense that they have become cops and soldiers in Akhmetov’s private pro-Kiev army. Worse, it sets them up for war with other Ukrainian and Russian workers, in their own city, in the Ukraine, in the whole Eurasian region. It delivers them into the hands of rival bosses, rival imperialists allied with local capitalists, to be used as cannon fodder against other workers flying different bosses’ flags. Every flag save the red one is a boss’s flag.
The U.S. and Europe support Kiev and Ukrainian nationalism as weapons against their rival imperialist, Russia. If you join Akhmetov’s militia to protect your job you are doing nothing but offering your services to Western imperialism against Russian imperialism. You would do better to think about turning imperialist wars like the one shaping up in Ukraine into a class war of workers internationally against all bosses of whatever camp. You would do better to take over the mills and mines from Akhmetov and call on Russian workers to join you in overthrowing their bosses too. You have the power to do that, as the quick pacification of the city by organized industrial workers showed. But you also need the communist politics of workers’ unity across all ethnic and national borders to use that power for our whole class. And that means turning your back on nationalism, on all nationalisms, as PLP argues. Patriotism is a boss’s lie.
The other story is from Vietnam, where anti-Chinese nationalism turned violently racist.
One Chinese laborer said angry Vietnamese workers had stomped on his hands, crushing them. Another said his son had been struck in the head with a metal rod by a Vietnamese mob that had sought out Chinese for beatings. At least one Chinese worker died (NYT).
This is a tragedy for our class. Both Vietnamese and Chinese workers are exploited by bosses of many nationalities, and nationalist strife between them only serves the exploiters on both sides. When Vietnamese workers turn from attacking foreign-owned factories to killing foreign workers, they show the ultimate peril of nationalism for our class. It is class suicide for workers to turn on one another like this, to define one another as “foreign,” to kill one another for a boss’s lie.
The fact that two generations earlier both Vietnamese and Chinese workers fought for communism together makes this tragedy most bitter. What a falling off from the line of the Vietnamese communist poet To Huu: “For the Party’s long life/together we march/with the same heart.” Now it’s the task of communists to revive that beating heart of proletarian revolutionary internationalism. We know it will need the same heroism that To Huu’s nephew Little Huom displayed, dying in battle “in a jet of blood”:
His cap askew
he whistled away like a warbler on a garden path Even the most tragic moment has its beauty, because Huom’s red song goes on like the life of humanity itself. That is why he fought, and why we fight on in his name.
In Vietnam the inter-imperialist rivalry is between Western and Chinese imperialism, with Japan at the moment on the Western side. Vietnam, so heroic in its defeat of first the French then U.S. imperialist armies, will be crushed under the feet of these elephants if they do battle. The U.S. and Japan want Vietnam to side with them against China. There is nothing but destruction for workers in Vietnam if they follow any of these bosses. Sisters of Vietnam, turn your back on suicidal nationalism. Show us again as you did in my youth, you who “don’t need a beard to be a hero” (To Huu), how communist workers fight for a human future!
Old Comrade