International Solidarity and Revolutionary Communist Preparation Against Right‑wing and Left‑wing “Sovereignism”

The contradictions of the capitalist economy are constantly eroding the foundations of the domination of the bourgeois class, which is forced to work tirelessly to contain the social effects of the crisis. While on the one hand it must act to intensify the economic exploitation of the proletariat, on the other hand it must prevent the working masses from regaining class independence and expressing effective defensive struggles.

This containment of the proletariat is carried out, to a great extent, through the material coercion intrinsic to the economic mechanism of the extraction of surplus value, but a further and far from secondary role is assigned to the ideological control over the whole proletariat. Our class science, which sees a determinism in the future of society, has never underestimated this aspect, given that in the “German Ideology”, a work by Karl Marx and Friedrich Engels of 1846, it was already stated that the dominant ideology in every society is always that of the dominant class, which has not only a monopoly of the means of material production but also of the means of intellectual production. Hence the role that is entrusted to the gigantic apparatus of reproducing this ideology, which includes the press, television, radio, school, churches, publishing houses, etc.

It is not surprising, therefore, that the “politics” of the bourgeois world has for decades become the subject of a media show that is as trivial as it is noisy and redundant, in order to keep the proletariat confused and paralysed. Thus, the incessant political struggle between the different bourgeois sub‑classes, consumed between manoeuvres and palace intrigues, today rebounds in the empty and senseless news mash‑ups and in the exhausting parades of talk shows. Not that the bourgeoisie has ever offered a decent show of itself, not even in its youthful and revolutionary spring, a golden age on which the sun has forever set in the West, and whose return we will certainly not invoke – in contrast to the left wing of the bourgeoisie, with its vacuous talk of democratic renewal.

However, in recent times the “political” scene has offered a spectacle that is even more coarse and vulgar, and the phenomenon is clearly general, evident in many countries. The bourgeoisie hides its class dictatorship and its genuine remote centres of power under a shimmering efflorescence of parties, of ideologies made up only of catchphrases, of political “personalities”, which are as loudly trumpeted as they are increasingly and endlessly inept and wicked, both inside and outside parliaments.

Examples can be seen in Trump, Brexit, Germany’s Alternative for Germany and the new Italian government led by the front man Giuseppe Conte: big news! They all shamelessly and unhesitatingly proclaim an aggressive, xenophobic, “sovereign” nationalism, the same one that previous governments had practiced, albeit in a badly concealed manner while feigning a certain embarrassment, which is echoed in the mainstream media. As a result, the populists can be more open. How often do we hear of these people, “they have the courage to say what people are thinking”. But even the most philistine idealist could not possibly maintain that “what people are thinking” simply enters their heads from nowhere!

Since there is a risk that the working class may identify capital as its true enemy, what better than pointing the finger at immigrants, taking cowardly persecutory positions towards these proletarians and ethnic minorities, accusing them of all evils in the name of an alleged purity of national, racial and religious traditions. And how well does the inevitable, generically “humanitarian” reaction, whether Christian or secular, serve the status quo, such as “let’s help them at home” and “let’s help but let’s put British/Italians/Germans/Americans first”?

The only real difference is in the verbiage of these political salesmen. “Sovereignism”. First of all, it is nothing more than a euphemism for nationalism, a term which, especially in Germany and Italy, could not be used to frame a proletariat unwilling to kneel before the bloodthirsty idol of the “fatherland”, permanently in the heat of military adventures. This was difficult if not impossible for many decades, after the tragic experience of the two world wars. In other countries that suffered relatively less in those wars (contrary to the self‑serving national myths about sacrifice and “the greatest generation”) such as the United Kingdom and the United States, sovereignism gained traction more readily as a way to misrepresent economic decline as a phenomenon imposed by “bad deals” (Trump) or European interference (Brexit). But despite such differences by country, there is a common thread in the revisiting and re‑baptizing of ancient and stale categories whenever they are useful to disguise and repackage the purposes of the bourgeois reason of State, which of course cannot be confessed in its naked form.

In short, a new opiate, or hallucinogenic, is being experimented, with countries that have played the role of political laboratory several times in modern and contemporary history taking the lead: notably Britain, the USA and Italy.

Yet it was the work of previous left‑wing or liberal governments that prepared the ground for the current right‑wing populism of the current governments: for example, the slogan of “British jobs for British workers” touted by the Labour Party and Barack Obama’s American Jobs Act, which he announced with the words, “we’re going to make sure the next generation of manufacturing takes root not in China or Europe, but right here, in the United States of America”.

The sovereign apparel currently donned by the Italian bourgeoisie, and most strongly flaunted in the “right‑wing populism” of Conte and Salvini, is in turn the result of the “left‑wing populism” of previous governments. It was the government of Paolo Gentiloni that supported the mystification of the “immigration emergency” to direct it in a reactionary direction and confuse the working masses, diverting them from the problems linked to their living conditions in times of economic crisis. It was the Gentiloni government that, working with the government in Tripoli, ensured that tens of thousands of migrants ended up in concentration camps to suffer, through horrendous torture, the “guilt” of having escaped war and hunger.

In the United Kingdom it was the conservative‑liberal coalition government of David Cameron that set an artificial “target” on immigration in 2013, effectively clearing the ground for the sovereignty fanatics of the Tory right and UKIP.

The regime of capital needs the pastiche of fake contrasts between fictitious groups, which are an expression of interchangeable political forces; all of them however are confederated against the working class. Just as democracy in the imperialist phase of capitalism is complementary to and not opposed to fascism, so too antifascists side only in words against the fascists, wrapping themselves in the same cloak of totalitarianism, using fascism’s own “post‑democratic” and authoritarian methods, and sharing the same rusty ideological arsenal made up of prejudices and trivial clichés. Similarly, the political forces that make the fight against populism their banner, steal the latter’s watchwords and choose the same themes of electoral propaganda and miseducation of the proletariat.

We discover nothing original in the bourgeoisie recruiting mainstream democratic parties of left and right to cooperate in controlling the proletarian masses with the most brutal repression. In Italy, this is termed “trasforismo” and goes all the way back to the period after unification, long before Mussolini. It already prefigured many elements of fascism: Giovanni Amendola, champion of “democratic irredentism” and interventionist in the First World War, an anti‑fascist, was the notorious minister of the colonies in the Facta government up until Mussolini’s March on Rome to seize power in 1922. Stalinism in the Second World War, siding with one of the two imperialist fronts, subdued the partisan military organization under the allied commands, which in the meantime bombed the proletarian districts of the cities, just as the Allies bombed proletarian districts of German cities in the name of combating Nazism. After the war, the Stalinist party of the so‑called “Italian way to socialism”, that of the governments of National Unity, sowed the seed of chauvinism within the working class with a constant reminder of the “general interests of the Nation”.

In Britain, the Labour Party was from the very first keen to establish its reputation as a party of government; it gave its enthusiastic support for the First World War, disassociated itself from the General Strike of 1926 in the “national interest” and was unstinting in its prosecution of the Second World War behind the imperialist front under the banner of democracy. It was Ernest Bevin, co‑founder of the Transport & General Workers’ Union, who mobilized organized labour behind the war effort and then, as Foreign Secretary in the post‑war period, consolidated the Cold War alliance with America and made anti‑communism a central ideological plank of the Labour Party. In America, it was the “left‑wing” Democratic Party that was most assertive of US imperialism and prosecution of the Cold War on a global scale.

As Marxists we certainly do not deny the historical function of national sovereignty in the establishment of the revolutionary bourgeoisie and its states. But, unlike the idealistic and romantic conceptions with which the bourgeoisie represented and exalted the concept of the nation, we identify its essentially economic function aimed at the unification and protection of the markets.

But, as was pointed out in 1848 by the Manifesto of the Communist Party, the degree of interrelation between the different cultures and geographical areas of the world was already very high at that time, over and above national borders:

“The bourgeoisie has through its exploitation of the world‑market given a cosmopolitan character to production and consumption of all countries. To the great chagrin of Reactionists, it has drawn from under the feet of industry the national ground on which it stood. All old‑established national industries have been destroyed. They are dislodged by new industries, whose introduction becomes a life and death question for all civilised nations, by industries that no longer work up indigenous raw material, but raw material drawn from the remotest zones; industries whose products are consumed, not only at home, but in every quarter of the globe. In place of the old wants, satisfied by the productions of the country, we find new wants, requiring for their satisfaction the products of distant lands and climes. In place of the old local and national seclusion and self‑sufficiency, we have intercourse in every direction, universal interdependence of nations. And as in material, so also in intellectual production. The intellectual creations of individual nations become common property. National one‑sidedness and narrow‑mindedness become more and more impossible, and from the numerous national and local literatures, there arises a world literature (…)

“Modern industry has established the world‑market, for which the discovery of America paved the way. This market has given an immense development to commerce, to navigation, to communication by land. This development has, in its time, reacted on the extension of industry; and in proportion as industry, commerce, navigation, railways extended”.

On the eve of the great upheaval of 1848, which upset the old European balances, the Manifesto still recognized a progressive role to the nationalities that had to shake the yoke of foreign domination, like Poland, or had yet to conclude the process of state unification like Germany and Italy. The formation of new states by what were then considered “vital nations”, in reference to their economic potential, was an undoubted step forward in removing those feudal obstacles that prevented the full development of capitalism. Marx and Engels wrote that the proletariat had to fight against “the enemies of their enemies”, that is, in an alliance with the bourgeoisie against the decrepit nobility.

However, the two authors of The Communist Manifesto warned already at that time: the proletariat has no fatherland. Therefore, the support that the proletariat lent to the bourgeoisie in its revolutionary phase did not in the least imply identification with the destiny of the nation: once the objective of overthrowing the feudal classes had been reached, the process of “permanent revolution” would have placed the proletariat in armed collision with the bourgeoisie.

This happened in France already in June 1848 with the bloody armed clash in Paris, which Marx defined as “the first great battle between the two classes into which modern society is divided, in a struggle for the preservation or destruction of the bourgeois order”.

The massacres of defenceless workers in June 1848 were replicated on a much larger scale by mass shootings in the 1871 repression of the Paris Commune. In this case a decisive role was played by the collaboration between the Prussian and the Versailles governments, which were enemies until the day before. As Marx commented on that occasion, “The highest heroic effort of which old society is still capable is national war; and this is now proved to be a mere governmental humbug, intended to defer the struggle of classes, and to be thrown aside as soon as that class struggle bursts out into civil war. Class rule is no longer able to disguise itself in a national uniform; the national governments are one as against the proletariat!”

Today, just 150 years later, the phase of national revolutions must be considered closed, not only in Europe but in the whole world. And in an economically and politically interconnected world such as the present one, the sovereignty of a State means only the following: war on the working class within its borders, and outside of these, war on the other States in every possible way.

Because not even the neologism of “globalization” convinces us, and even less that of “globalism”, meaning the attempt of the “elites” of international high finance to wrest any real economic and political power from the national States, to then subjugate them all together to a single control: When the supporters of sovereignty determine who is responsible for the failures of the capital regime, they do not blame the bourgeois class as a whole; instead they attack a few “big families” or individual tycoons, such as the Rothschilds or George Soros.

When speaking of “globalism” does not serve the task of denying the common interests of the working class, proletarian internationalism is deemed to be a “conspiracy”, perhaps a Jewish and/or Masonic one, designed to eradicate national cultural peculiarities. In the UK and Germany in particular, the talk is of an enforced “Islamization” under the direction of shadowy anti‑national forces.

There is nothing new in this, but to come right up to date, the ideological category of sovereignism now stands in opposition to “multilateral cooperation”. This is the world‑view that animates Trump’s “Make America Great Again” and the British supporters of a “no‑deal” Brexit, who constantly invoke “democracy” and “the will of the people” against internationalist elites.

What is the truth behind this? That an immense and real tension is growing beneath the surface: imperialism reveals itself more and more, connects and crushes the planet; but there are limits to super‑imperialism, which make it incompatible with capitalism and make it an illusion, a stage in human history that will never be reached. This permanent contradiction regulates the world cycle of peace and war, with the breaking of old alliances between states and the ephemeral formation of new ones. The gunboats of the inter‑imperialist have already started to fire, and with large calibre missiles. For the time being this is confined to international trade, but the missiles are worth billions of dollars, and have already hit Volkswagen, with the prolonged spiel about emissions and Google, with the fiscal penalty in Europe.

The bourgeois class is indeed an international class, to which belong the national states that it uses to subjugate and divide the proletariat. But the proletariat is also a class that is by nature international, which will be able to deploy its extraordinary strength only through its united struggle in all countries, overthrowing the rotten regime of capital and imposing its dictatorship. To the “sovereigns” of the right, left and centre, we leave the questionable delights of the “economic fatherland”, the false national cultural traditions and the fetishism of money; for the proletarians of every language and colour there is an entire world to be conquered.