(THIS ARTICLE IS MACHINE TRANSLATED by Google from Norwegian)
Most of us know it well: Today, politics is nothing more than a depressing spectacle, where we are forced to choose between one more bland policy item than the other. Politics and commodity production are completely fused: We have goods to choose from – the politicians; we have consumers – voters; And then we have a well-developed advertising system that not only has to sell the candidates, but also this political misery in its entirety. Elections do not really matter – in recent years there have been no truly significant societal changes through election campaigns.
In times of crisis, they mean even less, because governments do not really have room to maneuver, but are forced to save and privatize if they do not want to get rid of the money and switch to a general distribution of necessities. Syriza's sad fate speaks its clear language. It is not possible to place restrictions on capital. If they are to be funded, governments have no choice but to maintain the economy and its social and ecological misery. Those are the premises. You may well gain power, as Syriza did, but you cannot change the economy, that is, production and distribution.
Nationalized protest. Therefore, the starting point for any discussion of a societal struggle must be the analysis of the comprehensive mobilizations that took place between 2010 and 2012. People responded to the savings policies launched by governments around the world in an effort to save the economies (and banks).
In Athens, Madrid and Lisbon, cuts were fiercely protested. In Tunisia, Egypt, Yemen, Syria, and a host of other countries in North Africa and the Middle East, protests against rising food prices developed into real uprisings that threatened to overthrow the entire region. In the United States, an artistic performance evolved into an occupation movement that spread to hundreds of cities in the country. After more than three decades of one-sided class struggle, the occupations were a huge wake-up call: Suddenly, the socialization of bank debt and the huge inequality became a real political problem.
The European left is not trying to curb the racial backlash, but is part of it today.
Together, the protests marked the beginning of a global revolt with explicit capital criticism. They referred to each other and borrowed forms of action across borders. But soon the rebellion tried to be translated into local national matches; the left-wing political parties and trade unions clamped down on the protests and channeled them into the established national-democratic framework of political parties, labor agreements and national welfare.
National performance. This nationalization of the protests is part of the explanation for the subsequent evolution in which authoritarian isolationism has set the agenda: Brexit, Trump and the threat of right-wing populism. In this process, the so-called left wing has played a very problematic role in constantly understanding both the protests, the return of an international class struggle, and the economic crisis that has to do with fundamentally similar international structural contradictions in the capitalist mode of production, as a contrast between the national and the global, where the national becomes a response to a runaway globalization. The nation state is always the solution. After all, the cause of the financial crisis is the irresponsible and unregulated banks, supranational institutions and unelected bureaucrats in the EU, the IMF and the World Bank. The solution, therefore, is to recreate an imagined national sovereignty by voting for the notion of it.
We know the quandary: We have to have the decision-making power back, and we want to control the economy ourselves. As if a state-run national economy can rein in the globalization movement and reverse a 40-year, slow economic stagnation in the advanced economies. It is an ideological shift in which the contradiction between capital and labor is replaced by a contradiction between «the international» and «the national». Although the reason the stagnation could last for so long was the global breakthrough of computer science and the access to exploit cheap labor in China and the surrounding area.
By definition, the nation excludes all who are outside and who form the framework of capitalist social relations
The racist left. The nation state is thus the solution; "We" must decide for themselves. The incumbent left in the West, unfortunately, seems unable to rise above the national democracy as a framework for its actions. Thus, a whole palette of racist policies has been organized.
The European left is not trying to curb the racial downturn, but is part of it today. The last remnants of Republican citizenship are in rapid succession everywhere, and so is what remains of common humanity in Europe. The Danish social democracy is in a league of its own: Racism is so ingrained in the party that it is not possible to see a difference between the Danish People's Party and the Social Democracy.
In Denmark, the struggle for the racist voices knows no bounds. But elsewhere, too, things are slipping: In Norway, the Labor Party is beginning to look more and more like its Danish sister party, talking about "a strict but fair" asylum policy; in the UK, Corbyn is advocating managed migration; in Germany, Die Linke talks about all the problems immigrants bring to Germany about Merkel being too weak; and in Greece, Syriza is pushing hard for refugees / migrants and clearing large-scale occupied houses.
It is astonishing that it is not possible to see the difference between left and right, but this is how it is today in the West. It calls for the need for pervasive self-criticism on the left, locally and globally. If the left still has the task of wiping out capitalism, then it must necessarily go to battle against the nation state. IN The Communist Manifesto Marx and Engels end by outlining a revolutionary minimum program: private property must be abolished and the nation state liquidated. There has been a lot of sand in the river since then, but it is still a good starting point for the formulation of a revolutionary position.
Enter the nation state. If the Unity List wants to fight National Democratic isolationism and wants something other than Social Democratic racism and white welfare, it must reconcile the idea of the nation state and the notion of "national welfare": It is not enough from time to time to frown upon another racist commentary or criticism of yet another tightening of the already inhumane refugee and immigration policy; it is necessary to let go of the notion of political sovereignty. It is time to abandon the nation, which by definition excludes all those who are outside and which form the framework of capitalist social relations. If you are against exploitation and alienation, then you are against the nation state, which only hides these matters.
