Internationalism
Socialist Outlook1990sPhil HearseScanned print read by OCR, and not yet proofread: expect run-together words, dropped letters and, where a piece began partway down a page, a few lines of its neighbour. The printed page is the authority.
In the 1960s Marshall McLuhan talked about the world becoming a 'global village'. Today politics is global in the most direct sense. When Mikhail Gorbachev catches cold a revolution happens in Eastern Europe and there is a semi-revolutionary uprising in China.
The scenes of people, mainly young people, greeting one another at the Berlin wall were not mainly a sign of reactionary German nationalism: they were the spontaneous expression of internationalism among youth today. Other things have shown it dramatically. The response of millions to Live Aid, to Nelson Mandela, and in a more political way to the Nicaraguan revolution show the potential. This is not just altruism, but a live sense of internationalism. The question is, what should the left do with it? How can we utilise this internationalism for positive socialist ends?
Socialist internationalists have nothing in commom with the yuppies at whom Robert Maxwell aimed his "European' - people who speak at least one foreign language, know the difference between plonk and good wine and go abroad for their holidays' (generally making boorish idiots of themselves). The smug pseudo-cosmopolitanism of the British middle class young is only the flip side of their inherent racism and chauvinism. Little England takes pride in knowing its claret, as it has done since the English kings owned whole chunks of France.
Neither is true internationalism the facile 'we are all the same' lowest common denominator of the Eurovision song contest and the kind of outdated pop songs which predominate in ski resorts and the Costa del Sol. Real internationalism is the solidarity of struggle; of the Spanish civil war, of the Vietnamese resistance, of Nicaragua and the black struggle in South Africa.
But new times require new forms of solidarity. The internationalisation of production goes hand-in-hand with the internationalisation of politics. The multinational corporation which can move production from one end of its 'global factory' to another with the flick of a computer switch makes international trade union organisation a vital necessity.
But the specific form of internationalism we need today must be premised on an understanding of the collapse of Stalinism and the new global offensive of imperialism. Its specific targets are the peoples of the third world and of Eastern Europe.
First and foremost the peoples of both these areas are the victims of the debt crisis and the IMF and World Bank-inspired austerity offensives. The effects of these in Latin America are well-known. In Eastern Europe they are being utilised as a lever to impose austerity, privatisation and price rises - in return for capital investment. Hungary and Poland have been early victims. The international campaign against the debt is gaining ground. In 1989, during the 'G7' meeting of Bush, Kohl, Thatcher and the rest in Paris, 20,000 people demonstrated against the debt. The 1991 G7 meeting is in London - an opportunity to extend the campaign against the debt to Britain. The campaign against the debt must be built far and wide. Europe is being carved up and redivided behind the backs of its people. The institutions being used for this are the IMF, the World Bank and something which calls itself Europe' - the European Community. Socialists should have no illusions that the EC is anything other than the capitalist club - an unreformable one - it
has always been. Bringing solidarity to the peoples of the third world and Eastern Europe means demanding an end to the debt, and for new patterns of trade and aid. In Eastern Europe and the Soviet Union it means demanding an end to the trade restrictions and tariffs which have still not been removed by the West. Contemporary internationalism means understanding, as we argue in the next section, that there is the world-wide growth of a new type of class struggle and socialist organisation - exemplified by the Workers Party in Brazil, the FMLN in El Salvador and the new socialist and trade union organisations in the Soviet Union - with which we can link up and build. Socialist internationalism today, in the epoch of global politics - and, let it be said, affordable plane travel - has to be practically involved in building new socialist organisations in Eastern Europe and the Soviet Union; and aiding the emerging internationalist left in many parts of the world.