Affirmation of the proletariat as a single world class in the face of global capitalism, with a single set of interests, tactics and strategy and with a project, socialism, which can only be realized globally.
The world market as the foundation of the universal class
From their first approach to the proletariat as a universal class, Marx and Engels realized that the world market which capitalism was developing was a fundamental element of the very nature of the class, which is not revolutionary only because it is universal in the sense of not fighting for a particular privilege that would shape it into a new exploiting class, but because in itself it is born out of one and the same historical and world situation: the universalization of capitalist exploitation. The proletariat is called upon to become a universal historical subject, not a national or local one. It is called upon to follow internationalism.
The mass of mere workers (…) and therefore the no longer merely temporary loss of that very work as a secure source of life presupposes, through competition, the world market. The proletariat can thus only exist world-historically, just as communism, its activity, can only have a "world-historical" existence. World-historical existence of individuals means existence of individuals which is directly linked up with world history.
Marx and Engels. The German Ideology, 1845-1846
This idea will come back again and again, starting with the Manifesto of 1848: the creation of the world market shapes a world unified into a single, interconnected mode of production that creates a single world revolutionary class.
Through the exploitation of the world market, the bourgeoisie has given a cosmopolitan character to the production and consumption of every country. To the great chagrin of the reactionaries, it has taken away from industry its national basis. The old national industries have been destroyed and are being continually destroyed. They are supplanted by new industries, whose introduction becomes a vital question for all civilized nations, by industries that no longer work up indigenous raw materials, but raw materials brought from the most remote regions of the world, and whose products are consumed not only in the country itself, but in every part of the globe.
In place of the old isolation and self-sufficiency of regions and nations, there is established a universal intercourse, a universal interdependence of nations. And this applies to material as well as to intellectual production. The intellectual production of one nation becomes the common property of all. National narrowness and exclusiveness become more and more impossible every day; out of the numerous national and local literatures a world literature is formed.
Marx and Engels. Manifesto of the Communist Party, 1848
That is why its project, not only communism but socialism, only has meaning and viability as a global mode of production, driven by a single world class.
Empirically, communism is only possible as the act of the dominant peoples "all at once" and simultaneously, which presupposes the universal development of productive forces and the world intercourse bound up with them
Marx and Engels. The German Ideology, 1845-1846
The proletariat is not part of the nation
This statement and this perspective are all the more valuable in that they occur in the midst of rising capitalism, when the bourgeoisie was still struggling to constitute itself as a nation in countries that were to become central to the system. Nevertheless, Marx and Engels are careful to emphasize that all the national/democratic tasks the proletariat can take up amount to helping the bourgeoisie to seize power as soon as possible, not to defining itself as, or deluding itself into seeing itself as, part of the nation.
In Germany the decisive struggle between the bourgeoisie and the absolute monarchy still lies ahead. But since the Communists cannot count on a decisive struggle with the bourgeoisie before the latter comes to power, it is in the interest of the Communists to help it to win dominance as soon as possible, in order to overthrow it, in its turn, as soon as possible. Therefore, in the struggle of the liberal bourgeoisie against the [absolutist] governments, the Communists must always be on the side of the former, guarding themselves, however, against the self-deception into which the bourgeoisie falls and not trusting its seductive assurances about the beneficial consequences which, according to it, the victory of the bourgeoisie will bring to the proletariat.
The only advantages that the victory of the bourgeoisie will offer the Communists will be: 1) various concessions which will make it easier for the Communists to defend, discuss and propagate their principles and, therefore, make it easier for the proletariat to unite into an organized class, closely knit and ready for struggle, and 2) the certainty that on the day the absolutist governments fall, the hour of the struggle between bourgeois and proletarians will come. From that day on, the policy of the party of the Communists will be the same here as in the countries where the bourgeoisie already rules.
Frederick Engels. Principles of Communism, 1847
In other words, even at the moment when the proletariat must fight alongside the bourgeoisie to sweep away the absolutist state, the last bastion of feudal power, the communists bring in the unity of the class perspective and fight against the illusions with which the bourgeoisie seeks to beguile them, illusions which in the end are summed up in the illusion of the "national community".
In its form, though not in its content, the struggle of the proletariat against the bourgeoisie is at first a national struggle. The proletariat of each country must, naturally, first of all settle matters with its own bourgeoisie. (…)
The workers have no country. We cannot take from them what they do not have. But since the proletariat must first of all conquer political power, raise itself to the condition of a national class, constitute itself as the nation, it is still national, although by no means in the bourgeois sense.
Marx and Engels. Manifesto of the Communist Party, 1848.
What does it mean "to constitute itself as the nation"? Precisely the opposite of accepting the "national community" and being regimented into it. It is obvious that in 1848, everywhere, the "organization of the proletarians into a class, and consequently into a political party" would take place first of all within national borders, in the space of the national state. But this is a form, a geographical container, not a content. Because the proletariat cannot assert itself within or as part of the nation, under the bourgeois "national community", since that would be the same as proclaiming that there is a community of interests, if not with the bourgeoisie, at least with national capital.
On the contrary, the proletariat constitutes itself as the nation by destroying it: it leads the rest of the non-exploiting classes, which understand that in order to defend their interests effectively they must join it in the destruction of the national state, and it immediately proclaims the "world Republic", as happened in the Paris of the Commune or in the Russia of 1917. The constitution as a "national class", as a political subject capable of contesting power with the national state, is not aimed at creating or shutting itself up in a national state, neither "its own" nor, even less, in partnership with the bourgeoisie. Each revolution itself will be "national only in form, not in content", and in any case it can only remain at that stage for a very short period.
XIX. Will it be possible for this revolution to take place in one country alone?
No. By creating the world market, big industry has already brought all the peoples of the earth, and especially the civilized peoples, into such close relation with one another that each depends on what happens in the land of the other. Moreover, it has so levelled social development in all civilized countries that in all of them the bourgeoisie and the proletariat have become the two decisive classes of society, and the struggle between them has become the main struggle of our day. Consequently, the communist revolution will not be a merely national revolution, but will take place simultaneously in all civilized countries, that is, at least in England, America, France and Germany.
It will develop in each of these countries more rapidly or more slowly, according to the degree to which industry is more developed in each of them, in which more wealth has been accumulated and greater productive forces are available. That is why it will be slower and more difficult in Germany and quicker and easier in England. It will likewise exert a considerable influence on the other countries of the world, and will radically alter and greatly accelerate their previous course of development. It is a universal revolution and will, accordingly, have a universal range.
Engels. Principles of Communism, 1847
Internationalism as a class boundary
Communism, the future and program that forms the class in the present, is a permanent affirmation, in strategy and in tactics, of the internationalist principle. In fact, it is its defining element.
The Communists are distinguished from the other working-class parties by this only: 1. In the national struggles of the proletarians of the different countries, they point out and bring to the front the common interests of the entire proletariat, independently of all nationality. 2. In the various stages of development which the struggle of the working class against the bourgeoisie has to pass through, they always and everywhere represent the interests of the movement as a whole.
Marx and Engels. Manifesto of the Communist Party, 1848.
The direct consequence is revolutionary defeatism: in the face of imperialist war -and in decadence all "national" wars are imperialist- communists affirm that the main enemy is always at home, in one's own country. The basic position of Marxism since 1914, when the first great imperialist war broke out, the internationalist position, is "the conversion of the imperialist war into class war". That is what happened in Russia in 1917 and in Germany in 1919. The first great slaughter of imperialist capitalism did not simply "end": it was stopped by the class struggle.
The conversion of the present imperialist war into a civil war is the only correct proletarian slogan, one that follows from the experience of the Commune, and outlined in the Basle resolution (1912); it has been dictated by all the conditions of an imperialist war between highly developed bourgeois countries. However difficult that transformation may seem at any given moment, socialists will never relinquish systematic, insistent and unswerving preparatory work in this direction now that war has become a fact.
Lenin. The War and Russian Social-Democracy, 1914
Internationalism is the political expression of the nature of the proletariat as a universal class. Every notion of class collaboration during war, of "national defense", of "national liberation", of "sacred union", makes possible and props up imperialist war and the tendencies towards its extension. It only serves to regiment the workers for their own slaughter at the hands of other workers equally derailed from their own class interest. It is the ultimate and most evident negation of internationalism.
Internationalism does not consist in defending one and the same imperialist in different countries, even across the front lines of the war, but in confronting, as a single universal class, each and every one of the bourgeoisies in contention, all of them imperialist. It means understanding that "the proletariat has no country" and acting accordingly, as a single global political subject with its own program and objectives: communism.
Internationalism [means] solidarity of the world proletariat as a unity against international capitalism. Solidarity both in ideas and in deeds, directed against the nation and patriotism in the first place, colonial countries included. There can be no interest higher than that of the world proletariat, not even that of a country where the revolution had triumphed.
Internationalists fight with equal fury against both contending sides in local imperialist wars as much as in wars of a world character, and they denounce their respective partisans and propagandists as traffickers in human flesh. They propose and strive to organize the action of the exploited, at the front and in the rear, against their respective governments and military commands. All national defense -even in its degree of resistance- conceals exploitation and oppression. The immediate enemy, for each proletariat, is in its own country; harassing it to the utmost is the condition for unleashing the struggle of the proletariat in other countries and undertaking, united, the destruction of capitalism throughout the world.
G. Munis. Lexicon of Contemporary Political Thuggery, Compared with the Revolutionary Lexicon, 1970.
That is why internationalism is a class boundary. When a tendency or organization abandons it, regimenting the proletariat for war, it crosses a limit that objectively places it on the other side of the class line and reveals a previous mortal degeneration that cannot be treated as a mere one-off error. That is why the abandonment of internationalism by the majority of the Second International when the first imperialist world war broke out was answered by the formation of the communist parties and a Third International. And when the latter subordinated the world revolution to the needs of the Russian state ("socialism in one country"), a new rupture took place which led the internationalists to form a Fourth International out of the Communist Left.
In 1939, when the Second World War broke out, the Fourth International immediately published a revolutionary defeatist manifesto, directly inspired by Lenin's a quarter of a century earlier. But behind this excellent declaration of principles, there were only a few genuinely communist groups (in France, Mexico, Greece...) capable of defending proletarian internationalism tooth and nail. Held together with chewing gum and wire (the gum of the American SWP, the wire of La Vérité in France, for example), the Fourth International quickly fell into the national Resistance, where it became fatally inferior to stalinism. It could no longer remain a revolutionary force.
The omnipresence of internationalism in decadence
When a tendency betrays internationalism it is condemning itself to sterility. A consistent internationalism is vital because it defines the only possibility of political development of the class. That is why internationalism is the touchstone for being able to contribute to class consciousness in our time.
All [the guidelines of any form of political unity] are encompassed in internationalism. Its abandonment, in 1914, by the Second International for the sake of patriotic defense (capitalist, it can be nothing else) was a great disaster for the proletariat. Set in motion again [internationalism] by the Russian revolution, it gave rise to the first world revolutionary wave, which was contained in one country after another until it was defeated in Spain. The direct cause of that elimination of the proletariat as a class in struggle was the betrayal of internationalism by the Third International, a betrayal that stemmed from the interests of the state capitalism erected in Russia and hypocritically labelled socialist.
Internationalism thus gives us the key to understanding all the problems and to adopting, in conclusion, the theoretical notions necessary for the next offensive of the proletariat. It allows us to distinguish the merits and errors of the Russian revolution, to understand its backward march to the stalinist counter-revolution, its reactionary world role through its parties, the defeat of the Spanish revolution, Franco's victory and his duration in power, the war of 1939-45, the national-imperialist resistances and all the subsequent national wars or movements of the same nature, the conversion of the former communist parties into anti-communist parties, the degenerative industrial growth in the West as well as in Russia, China and the backward countries, the long stagnation of the proletariat since the war up to now and the growing reactionary importance of the trade unions; it equally allows us to understand the present retrograde stupidity of Trotskyism, and even the primitivisms, charlatanry, theoretical errors or indigence of numerous groups more showy than plainly revolutionary.
On the other hand, going far beyond the situation of generalized or regionalized imperialist war, internationalism also gives us the key to the tactics and strategy to be adopted in the struggle of the proletariat against capitalism, a struggle that scorns frontiers and that can only be worldwide, wherever it may begin. Worldwide geographically, worldwide in its concrete content, in its demands. We will thus be led to confront each and every one of the political regimes of capital (that of Spain, that of the United States, that of Russia or that of any Angola) with the solutions that the communist revolution holds ready for the various aspects of the exploitation of man by man.
G. Munis. Let Us Cupellate, Comrades, 1975
It is certainly not a "theoretical" question; it is a question of basic class perspective that manifests itself from the workplaces to the mass struggles, because the subject of the class struggle today, more than ever, is the world proletariat.
Proletarian internationalism, which outside of theoretical analysis and the formation of the revolutionary's consciousness found in former times hardly any practical application except during war, today becomes indispensable in the midst of peace, every day and in many ways. The immediate struggle of the proletariat against its nearest enemy, be it bourgeois or stalinist, can only be waged illusorily unless it is imbued with internationalism.
The very economic demands necessary today are indefensible, even impossible to formulate, unless they are based directly on the world proletariat as their subject and object, and above all as the annihilator of national barriers, armies, war production, the economy of capital and wages. Revolutionary internationalism, with all its consequences, must make its appearance in the factory, where the paramilitary drill-masters of the two blocs force upon the proletariat, like a straitjacket, their respective uniforms.
G. Munis. "The Fourth International", 1959