Socialist Quotes for Sunday Reflection pt 5

"Nationalism does not conflict with internationalism. Mutual help, support and alliance between countries and nations-this is internationalism. Every country has its borders, and every nation has its identity, and revolution and construction are carried on with the country and nation as a unit. For this reason, internationalism finds its expressions in the relationships between countries and between nations, a prerequisite for which is nationalism. Internationalism divorced from the concepts of nation and nationalism is merely an empty shell. A man who is unconcerned about the destiny of his country and nation cannot be faithful to internationalism.

Revolutionaries of each country should be faithful to internationalism by struggling, first of all, for the prosperity of their own country and nation."

~Kim Jong-Il, On Having a Correct Understanding of Nationalism" (2002)

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All my life I’ve been proud to come from Donetsk. Every house, every street, I can tell you when they were constructed, and by who. The statues and the monuments, I know nearly all the architects. I can tell you what flowers sprout in our streets and how many roses we have ... I can also tell you what battles took place here in 1941, in 1942, and 1943. In Ukraine there are only two places like this: the inhabitants of Lviv are proud of their city, and the inhabitants of Donetsk of theirs. West and East, that’s all.

Alexander Zakharchenko

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Michel Aflaq, co-founder of the Ba'ath (Renaissance) party, Syrian-Arab nationalist and socialist :

"If I were asked about my predilection towards socialism I would answer: with regard to this issue what I aspire to is not to increase the wealth of factories but that of life. My concern is not that people should be equal in the distribution of food but that every individual should be allowed to exploit his talents and potential. The laborer crushed by his misery may not find in socialism anything except a promise that he may take what he is deprived of, but I view it as continuous and generous giving, as giving to life many times what it has offered us."

(The wealth of life, 1936)

"He who thinks that socialism is a religion of pity is gravely mistaken. We are not hermits taking refuge in mercy to give peace to a conscience disturbed by seeing misery and suffering, so that we become great in our own eyes and sleep untroubled. Defending deprived masses is not a matter of giving them alms but demanding their rights. We are not only concerned about alleviating misery but also about increasing the wealth of life."

(The wealth of life, 1936)

"In fact this class on which the representation of the country fell in a certain period is very far from the spirit of the nation, its needs and requirements, for it is a senile and ancient class whose vitality has been exhausted and its relation to the spirit of the nation shaken. It has become so servile to economic interests and traditional ' social influence that it is impossible for it to discern the qualities of the Arab life at this stage of development in its history .The consequence of this is that it enters the national struggle unwillingly while dreaming of stability and longing for rest. How many times during the short period of the national struggle has this class deluded itself that the play has come to an end, that the trust was delivered and that the time has come for plucking the fruits and receiving the wages. But the people in their renewed vitality, awakened instinct and repeated revolutions has been warning this class from time to time of the falsehood of its illusions and violently reminding it that the struggle is not yet finished."

(The new formula for patriotism -The Baath, 4 -July 17, 1946)

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Labour movements of the nineteenth-century were motivated as much by traditional artisans & communal feeling as by an emergent proletariat asserting itself in industrial society. It was only when craftsmanship & local identities made way that proletarian socialism could take control of unions & radical labour groups:

'Shoemakers in Lynn “remembered the self-reliance of the artisans,” according to Dawley, “and recalled the time when the tasks of shoemaking intimately intermingled with the tasks of family and community life [and]… the journeyman was both shoemaker and householder, whose daily activity followed the intertwining rhythms of both roles.” It was this background of “household independence” and “prefactory customs,” Dawley argues, that underlay the solidarity of factory workers during the early stages of industrialisation. “The militancy of the factory worker is hard to imagine without the legacy of artisan protest against the encroachments of capitalism into the sphere of production.”

'Most of the new labour historians would probably disown Calhoun’s emphatic statement that workers acknowledged the “priority of community over class”; but their work leaves no doubt that the working-class movement drew both moral and material support from local communities in which industrialisation threatened an older way of life. Small businessmen, shopkeepers, and even professional people sometimes sided with the workers in their struggle against outside capital. In Braidwood, Illinois, a sheriff disarmed Pinkerton detectives sent in to put down a strike of miners, declaring that he feared the miners “a good deal less” than “a lot of strangers dragooning a quiet town with deadly weapons in their hands.” The support workers received from local editors, lawyers, and law enforcement officers helps to explain why their ideology stressed the solidarity of the "producing classes” and identified “parasitic bankers and speculators, not employers, as the real enemy.

'By shifting attention from unionisation to the study of working-class culture, the new labour historians have shown that a whole way of life was at stake in the struggle against industrialism. Workers were defending not just their economic interests but their crafts, families, and neighbourhoods. The recognition that economic interests are not enough to inspire radical or revolutionary agitation or to make people accept its risks suggests a more sweeping conclusion. Resistance to innovation, it appears, is an important, perhaps indispensable ingredient in revolutionary action, along with a tendency to identify innovation with the disruption of older communities by invasive forces from outside. In the twentieth century, revolutions have typically taken the form of wars of national liberation, and something of the same impulse, it can be argued, underlay working-class radicalism in the nineteenth century. Workers saw their oppressors, the “capitalists” and moneylenders, as outsiders more often than they saw them as members of their own communities – agents of a foreign power, in effect, of a “paper system” or an international “money trust” that robbed Englishmen or Americans of their inherited rights and threatened to reduce them to slavery.

'The appeal to the past, in other words, also implied an appeal to local, regional, or national solidarity in the face of outside invasion – something far more substantial than the hypothetical solidarity of the international proletariat. For historians who inherit from the Enlightenment (in the form of Marxism) a belief that moral progress requires the replacement of local attachments and a parochial outlook by successively wider and more inclusive identities, culminating in the Workers’ International, the intensely localistic element in nineteenth-century radicalism (not to mention the religious spirit that informed it) comes as a disconcerting discovery. The new labour history represents the triumph of historical craftsmanship – a stubborn respect for the evidence – over ideology. It is not surprising that some some historians seek to soften the blow to their old beliefs by insisting on the “transitional” character of nineteenth-century radicalism. The last remnant of the Marxist assumptions that originally guided so much of this work, the telltale adjective “transitional” seems to imply that acceptance of the wage system should have led to a more accurate perception of workers’ interests, a recognition of the “brotherhood of all workers” (as Sewell puts it), and an understanding that a socialist revolution would have to rest on the demonstrable accomplishments of industrial capitalism, not on blind resistance to them.

'The steady decline of revolutionary fervour in the industrial working class, however, undermines our confidence in “transitions” of this sort. The “mature” and “progressive” solution usually turned out to be some version of Gompers’s oxymoronic dictum that “the way out of the wage system is through higher wages.”'

Christopher Lasch, *The True and Only Heaven*, pp. 215-16
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