Thinking like an internationalist

In the fourth of his series on rs21’s key political ideas, DK Renton explains why it’s vital to reject nationalism and stand with anti-imperialist struggles.

How do Marxists think like internationalists?

I described in the previous piece how Marx came to the opinion that the secret of the weakness of the British working class was its support for the British empire in Ireland. Among the first generation of socialists in Britain, there were many people who supported the Irish revolt without difficulty, seeing it as just another part of the revolutionary cause.

As a young woman, Marx’s daughter Eleanor joined vast crowds in London showing their support for Jeremiah O’Donovan Rossa, an Irish Nationalist, elected to the British parliament for the seat of Tipperary, even while he was in jail for writing articles for supporting the Irish Republican Brotherhood in their attacks on foreign rule. In the 1880s, just as the first socialist parties were growing, she addressed a march of 150,000 people who marched against the British government’s ‘Perpetual Crimes Act’, which would make all boycotts and meetings unlawful in Ireland. In her journalism, she sided with the people who used physical force against colonialism. ‘No Socialist looks on “outrages” as a virtue or thinks that violence can ever be anything but a miserable necessity,’ she acknowledged. But whatever crime the Fenians had committed, there was ‘a greater criminal’ than them: ‘the English Government’.

At our best, revolutionaries have seen the world as a totality, have grasped that developments in one country shape changes in another, that you cannot have freedom in the richest states if our wealth is bought off the backs of others living in poverty.

In 1961, at the height of the French war to sustain its colonial presence in Algeria, the philosopher and dissident Marxist, Jean-Paul Sartre, was asked to write a preface to a new book published by a young psychiatrist Frantz Fanon who had been born in Martinique and was now living in Algeria and part of the anti-imperialist cause. Sartre used that opportunity to criticise the large organisations of the French left, including the Communist Party, with its 300,000 members, its 150 seats in Parliament, and its four million voters. The Communists were not challenging French rule in Algeria, but making excuses for it.

The people of the global South, Sartre insisted, were demanding their independence and theirs was a righteous cause. The response of the French state had been to encourage French people living in Algeria to use violence on the people living around then. ‘The settler has only recourse to one thing: brute force, when he can command it,’ Sartre wrote, ‘the native has only one choice, between servitude or supremacy.’

‘The Left,’ Sartre wrote, ‘is embarrassed; they know the true situation of the natives, the merciless oppression they are submitted to; they do not condemn their revolt, knowing full well that we have done everything to provoke it. But all the same, they think to themselves, there are limits; these guerrillas should be bent on showing that they are chivalrous.’ 

Sartre spoke of the ‘guilt’ of those of his fellow leftists who were making excuses for imperialism abroad. Algeria was creating a civil war atmosphere in France, Sartre warned, and the time was long overdue for the left to take sides and embrace the cause of independence. ‘The terror has left Africa and is settling here.’ 

Many people have read Sartre’s ‘Preface’ and have drawn the conclusion that the left ignored Algeria, failed in its heroic mission to support struggles of the oppressed everywhere. But the story is more complex – Sartre was goading his comrades into action and many listened. The struggle in Algeria was constantly bringing in new people from outside; beginning with Fanon, who lived the ubiquitous racism within a French colony which was always setting whites against Arabs, Jews against both, everyone against such further despised minorities as Fanon himself, a black man born in the Caribbean of African heritage. 

Dissident Communists demanded that the French left invite Algerian speakers to address its meetings. Networks were founded to guard French soldiers who deserted, to republish their accounts of torture and its widespread use in the French army. Many of the French Trotskyist networks began in the early 1960s as clandestine organisations within the Communist Party, demanding that it speak out for an Algerian victory. One Trotskyist, Michel Raptis, founded an arms factory manufacturing small arms for the Algerian rebels. Thirty internationalists from a dozen countries worked alongside 300 volunteers from the Algerian independence movement, kept their factory a collective, and gave as much support as they could.

Ian Birchall, the historian of this internationalist movement, describes the many kinds of radical thought which contributed to this resistance: such anarchists as Pierre Morain, who was jailed as early as 1955 for publishing articles against the war. The Egyptian Communist, Henri Curiel, founded a network ‘Solidarity’, offering practical support to militants all over Africa and Asia with false documents, economic aid, safe-havens before and after operations.

In Britain today, we could not emulate these tactics – we don’t have the moral shield against state persecution which activists enjoyed in 1960s and 1970s France; a time when the French Resistance and the expulsion of the German troops was still a matter of living memory and there was still a definite nostalgia for the age of the partisan.

Nor, anyway, is internationalism ever best practised by radicals giving up their opportunities to build at home. The Marxist economist and revolutionary Nigel Harris made this point fifty years ago: ‘Unless the citadels of capitalism can be challenged from within, the global domination of the capitalist powers remain’. Taking internationalism seriously means identifying with workers struggles abroad, with all challenges to imperialism. But the task of socialists in the richest countries is to extend the victories won in the Global South, to challenge their isolation, and the role played by states such as the US and Britain in acting as the policemen of decaying authoritarian regimes. We must confront our own rulers.

Here are some insights from revolutionary theory which may help readers to better understand that task. Between the 1890s and 1910s a larger group of radicals, including the US anti-imperialist liberal Thorstein Veblen and orthodox social democrats such as the Austro-Marxist Rudolf Hilferding began to write about development under capitalism, how it was uneven (some countries were richer than others) and yet combined – economic innovations developed in one country at a time, then tended to spread through the system as a whole.

In his History of the Russian Revolution, Trotsky remarked that Russia had been compared to Britain or the US as an underprivileged society: its economy poor, its science backward. Against all Marxist expectations, the revolution had started in one the poorest countries first. The explanation was combined capitalist development: in Russia, despite general backwardness there were skilled workers, technicians, skipping whole stages of capitalist development as they acquired the latest technologies. 

Trotsky turned back to this idea in response to the isolation of the Bolsheviks and their failed attempts to spread their revolution. Economic growth was not only combined; it was also uneven. To win the global battle of ideas begun by 1917, Trotsky wrote, socialism must ‘represent a stage higher than capitalism’. No revolution could win alone: trade and production took place internationally, capitalism was a world system, united across borders, based on the interdependence of the richest and poorest states.

In the writings of Trotsky’s contemporaries, Lenin and Bukharin, there was a warning of what might befall a victorious revolution. They described this process as ‘imperialism’, by which they meant more than the general tendency for rich countries to want to dominate the poor. Over the first years of the twentieth century, capitalism in the richest countries had become concentrated as never before. Giant companies were formed and fused with the state. The competitions between these capitals for global domination began as an economic struggle then became a military one: hence the first world war. Achieve a socialist breakthrough in a world dominated by imperialist powers and, it was obvious to everyone, those two could not coexist. The major powers would seek to isolate and destroy their challengers.

Trotsky saw this as clearly as anyone. He described how technologies were being traded faster than ever before, how commercial industries were destroying older peasant economies, he saw too that in large parts of the world pre-capitalist political forms – states of kings and princes – were surviving even through this maelstrom of change.

The early Communists made extraordinary efforts to spread their insurrection: the founding of the Communist International, its attempted spreading through Asia through such initiatives as the Congress of the Peoples of the East.

In a phrase first formulated by Trotsky but used by other radical tendencies since, he began to speak of ‘permanent revolution’, a dynamic under which the battle against imperialism would necessarily be undertaken by socialists and revolutionaries. They would, on having seized power, have to take up tasks which the bourgeoisie in previous epochs had neglected – the introduction of constitutions, the democratisation of the state.

The lesson of struggles in the global South is that nothing guarantees that the revolution will be permanent, in Trotsky’s sense of the term. The states which emerged might be progressive or reactionary, might seek to introduce the most democratic reforms (as Algeria did between 1962 and 1965), or might become mere developmental dictatorships. Post-colonial states became centres for capital accumulation, not workers’ states – regardless of the sometimes heroic struggles involved in bringing them into being.

Stalinism in Russia became over time one of the worst of these regimes – a prison camp for revolutionaries, a system of one-party government, not a custodian of the memory of 1917, but where the revolution died. Yet the USSR was attractive beyond its borders, not least in China, because in 1928 Stalin took control of society, introduced industrialisation at a breakneck pace, and seemed to prove that the poorest countries might catch their rivals.

One historian and rs21 member, Neil Davidson, argued that the colonial revolutions of the 1960s found themselves in something like the same position as the bourgeois revolutionaries of Europe in the sixteenth and seventeenth centuries, not making a world fit for everyone, but having to create the conditions for capitalism to prosper in their country. In our own lifetimes, he insisted, that period ended. There are no more outposts left in the world, free of capitalist social relations. ‘From the opening of the neoliberal era at the very latest, the only social revolutions that it is possible to imagine have been socialist.’

If Davidson is correct, then the reasons to take internationalism seriously are even broader than they were for past generations of revolutionaries.  We should be internationalists because, just as in the day of Marx and the First International, the most valuable allies we are likely to find are those radicals who share with us a sense of the world as a single, total, terrain of struggle. We should think internationally because the countries we inhabit are players in the world system: spreaders of war and counter-revolution, and we owe it to the oppressed of the world that we fight beside them. We should organise beyond borders because struggles are always breaking out everywhere; we can learn from the latest developments to become better activists at home. 

We should join in the struggles of the world because the prospect of our defeat – global authoritarianism – is so bad. And because, following Davidson, it is ever harder to imagine a world of resistance which limits itself to just defending political democracy. People, everywhere, are seeing that democracy must have a social content, that the left cannot survive unless we have better answers than the right to how the world should be.

We should be internationalists because the change in which we believe is the outbreak of revolution right across the world and its final victory.