Unworkable

We live in a system of competing nation-states immersed in a global economy. This is an unworkable combination. A global economy requires cooperation based on common interest, while competition among nations assumes conflicting interests.

International disputes can disrupt the global chain of production and increase international tensions. A destructive spiral can develop that escalates into global war.

How do we solve this problem? Should we support global integration or national self-determination? Why must we choose? Surely we can find a way for people to shape their societies and cooperate to solve global problems.

Let’s begin by clarifying what is a nation, what is a State, and the difference between globalism and globalization.

What is a Nation?

MYTH: A nation is a collection of people inhabiting a boundaried territory who are united by common descent, history, culture, values, or language.

FACT: Nations are divided into social classes with opposing interests: a capitalist class, a working class, and a middle class. Many nations were founded on the genocide of indigenous peoples and have imported people from different regions. In no nation does everyone have the same values and concerns, or even speak the same language.

Nations are a Modern Invention

Nations did not exist before capitalism. Feudal society was dominated by powerful families who ruled a village or small region, each with their own language, traditions, and currency.

The capitalist revolution advanced production and trade by combining small feudal fiefdoms into larger national units with distinct geographic boundaries, an official language, and a common currency. This transition was chaotic and violent, as national borders were repeatedly challenged and redrawn.

For this discussion, the term ‘nation’ describes a bordered region dominated by a ruling class who a) extract capital from a domestic labour force and b) compete with foreign capitalists for natural resources, technology, labour-power, and markets.

What is Nationalism?

Nationalism is a feeling of pride in one’s nation and the belief that loyalty to the nation should come before all other loyalties. For workers, it means putting loyalty to the nation above loyalty to their class.

Nationalism is often expressed as an ‘us-against-the-world’ defense against the harms of globalization. Britain’s vote to leave the European Union and the election of Donald Trump to the U.S. presidency reflect the nationalist backlash against globalized capitalism.

Calls for national unity urge people to rally behind the national capitalist class and their slogans, such as Canada Strong and Make America Great Again. Those who resist are typically shunned as unpatriotic, untrustworthy, and a possible threat to the nation.

Right-wing nationalists feel threatened by ‘foreigners’ and support racist, anti-immigrant policies to expel them. Restricting immigration reduces the supply of workers, so many nationalists support anti-woman policies to increase birth rates.

Whether nationalists are right-leaning (as fascists are) or left-leaning (as social-democratic-labor parties are), all forms of nationalism seek salvation through the national State.

What is a State?

Most nations are dominated by a State, although some nations have no State (Kurds, Roma, Palestinians), and some States contain more than one nation (United Kingdom, Canada).

MYTH: The State is the guardian of society. It balances the needs of different groups and acts on behalf of the greater good.

FACT: The State is a network of institutions that uphold capitalist class rule regardless of who is elected to government.

Capitalist States take many forms: religious States (Israel and Iran), one-party States (Cuba and China), monarchies (Saudi Arabia and Qatar), and constitutional monarchies (Canada and the U.K.). The German State was just as capitalist under the left-leaning Weimar Republic as it was under Hitler’s fascist dictatorship. Latin-American States are just as capitalist under democratically elected governments as they are under military dictatorship. In times of war, all States take control of their economies.

Despite their regional, cultural, historic, and structural differences, all existing States are capitalist States. In no country have the working class seized control of production and redirected it to solve social problems.

Globalism and Globalization

Globalism is a belief in the value of international cooperation.

Globalization is the process of building global connections. How this process unfolds depends on which class is driving it and for what purpose.

The globalization we know today cannot be contained within national borders, but roams the world in search of profit.

To make its products, Apple corporation relies on suppliers in 43 countries on six continents. The average American vehicle contains thousands of parts, most of which cross the US, Canadian, and Mexican borders at least eight times. U.S. exports to China support more than one million jobs in the United States, and U.S. companies earn hundreds of billions of dollars annually from sales in China.

Globalization is known as colonialism or imperialism when corporations backed by stronger States extract capital from weaker nations. It typically takes brutal forms including indigenous genocide, environmental destruction, and the brutal exploitation of peasants and workers.

A different kind of globalization is driven by workers in different nations who collaborate to solve common problems. This form of globalization, known as internationalism, strives to eliminate the national borders that block global cooperation.

In this article, globalization refers to the capitalist-driven process, while internationalism refers to the worker-driven process.

Globalization Increases Inequality

Capital accumulation increases inequality between the few who profit and the many they exploit. Globalization accelerates this process.

When wages rise in one location, capitalists relocate where labor is cheaper. Workers are trapped behind national borders and cannot move to higher-waged areas. Fragmenting the working class into nations and forcing them to compete for jobs enables capitalists to drive down all workers’ wages in a race to the bottom.

By 1987, there were 140 billionaires in the world. This year, there are 3,028 billionaires with combined assets of over $16 trillion. To accumulate $16 trillion, you would have to generate nearly half-a-million dollars every single day for 100,000 years. Yet, nearly half of humanity suffer extreme poverty.

Free-trade policies promote the export of industries to more profitable regions with lower labor and environmental standards. Job loss at home is matched by job loss abroad as foreign corporations demolish local industries and destroy the environment.

For all these reasons, the later 1990s and early 2000s were rocked by international protests against globalization. Some demand a cooperative, democratized global economy, while others reject globalization altogether in favor of national economic control.

Two things are driving the current global crisis: the capitalist system is in terminal decline; and the United States is a fading empire.

Capitalism is in terminal decline

WWII was followed by a massive rebuilding boom. Over the next 25 years, industries flourished, jobs were plentiful, and employers met workers’ demands in order to keep profits flowing.

It was a time when good union jobs offered workers a middle-class life-style that included home-ownership and sending your kids to college. To calm the social rebellions of the 1960s, governments funded social programs that reduced poverty and raised living standards.

Capitalism contains a fatal flaw. Over time, increasing amounts of capital investment are needed to extract the same amount of profit, causing the rate of profit to fall.

The post-war boom ended with the 1970s global economic recession. As industry became less profitable, corporate investors turned to speculating in real estate, gambling on the stock market, and buying their own stock to inflate its price. Less investment in manufacturing caused economic growth to slow even more.

Frantic to restore profitability, governments shifted to neoliberal policies that accelerate the transfer of social wealth from the working class to the capitalist class. At best, this is a temporary fix. Impoverished populations have less money to spend on goods and services.

Capitalism began as an extremely dynamic system of production. Now it is in terminal decline, unable to meet people’s needs, advance human progress, or assure human survival.

No ruling class wants to believe that their system is declining and their time may be coming to an end. Instead, they cling to the delusion that restoring profitability will solve all problems.

Two Capitalist Myths

MYTH: Slower economic growth means living standards must fall.

FACT: Living standards have not fallen for the elite. Since 2020, the world’s five richest men have more than doubled their fortunes from $405 billion to $869 billion. That’s a staggering increase of $14 million every hour. Over the same time, more than half the world’s people grew poorer.

There’s more than enough to go around and has been for some time. Ending capitalist rule would free us to meet everyone’s needs.

MYTH: Productivity must rise for living standards to rise.

FACT: Until the mid-1970s, rising productivity (output-per-worker-per-unit-time) was somewhat matched by rising wages. Since then, productivity has risen 150 percent, profits have soared, and wages have stagnated. What changed?

As profitability declined, employers insisted that good times would return if workers accepted layoffs, cutbacks, speedups, and generally ‘tightened their belts.’ Union officials offered little resistance to these attacks, so while economies continued to grow (although more slowly), workers’ living standards fell.

The good times never returned. Refusing to admit their system is failing, the capitalist class intensify their attacks on the working class.

The United States is a Fading Empire

The United States emerged from World War II as the dominant nation and proceeded to turn the world into its factory. U.S.-based capitalists made huge profits establishing industries in nations with rock-bottom wages and minimal industrial and environment regulations.

To protect their overseas’ investments, the U.S. built the world’s most powerful military machine, making the U.S. Department of Defense the world’s largest employer. Thomas Friedman observed,

The hidden hand of the market will never work without the hidden fist. McDonald’s cannot flourish without McDonnell Douglas. The hidden fist that keeps the world safe for Silicon Valley’s technologies to flourish is called the US army, air force, navy and Marine Corps.

By investing their capital in more profitable industries overseas, the capitalist class engineer their own decline. Their home nation shifts from being a center of industry to a center of finance. In time, the foreign centers of industry they created overtake them. This is how the British empire gave way to the American empire, and how the American empire is falling behind the Chinese empire.

Having hollowed out its industrial core, the U.S. cannot generate enough capital to sustain its massive military machine and its global dominance. The result is a a declining economy, a failing empire, and a national debt that has doubled over the past decade.

The U.S. labor force would have to be reduced to a state of impoverished desperation to make U.S. manufacturing competitive in the global market. Even that would not be enough.

No matter who is in government or what policies they enact, the U.S. cannot raise enough capital to match China’s modernized production or surpass its expanding empire.

Labor Power

Early industrial unions were internationalist. They included every worker in the industry, regardless of where they came from, what language they spoke, or their cultural practices. Individually, these workers felt powerless. Standing together, they had power. After the 1937 strike that launched the United Auto Workers Union (UAW), one of the participants recalled,

Conditions changed inside the plants. The foremen were tip-toeing around, being very careful. Every time something came up that couldn’t be settled, or the workers got a tough foreman who told them, “Go to hell,” they’d push the button and shut down the line. They were not afraid of the boss anymore.

Employers were outraged that workers would stop production to press their demands. So the State offered unions the legal right to strike if they agreed to a contract-bargaining system that prohibits unauthorized strikes. Accepting this arrangement subordinated unions to the capitalist State.

The Union Establishment

To navigate the system of contract-bargaining, unions added a layer of full-time, higher-paid managers, negotiators, and administrative staff. Members’ dues are primarily used to support this bureaucratic layer instead of providing adequate strike pay and organizing more workers into unions. Since 2012, union assets have ballooned to tens of billions of dollars while the portion of workers in unions continues to fall.

Modern unions function as State-controlled institutions. The State claims the right to certify a union as the official workers’ representative. It can set the terms required for union certification, change those terms at will, and demand regular re-certification votes. It can block unions from collecting dues. It can prohibit strikes, outlaw mass pickets, forbid workplace occupations, pass back-to-work legislation, and block solidarity strikes that stop companies from doing business with companies under strike. When workers mount illegal ‘wildcat’ strikes, States demand that union officials discipline their members or risk steep fines, jail time, and even union decertification.

Workers have much to gain by challenging the bosses and their State and “nothing to lose but their chains.” Union bureaucrats cannot do the same without risking their six-figure salaries and accumulated assets. By law and by money, they are tied to the State and its policies.

Class Conflict in Unions

Union officials belong to a managerial middle class that stand between the two great classes. They are paid to advance workers’ interests, and they believe those interests are best served by keeping the company profitable. This is a class conflict.

Profit is the difference between the value workers produce and the wages they receive. Raising wages lowers company profits.

In a sluggish economy, union officials believe they must sacrifice workers’ wages and benefits to keep them employed. They refuse to consider advancing workers’ interests to the point of freeing them from the wage system altogether, freeing them to tackle the many jobs that are not done because they aren’t profitable, such as building affordable homes, restoring ecosystems, and upgrading infrastructure to ensure clean water and safe, reliable, renewable energy.

Instead of challenging the wage system, union officials partner with the State to get a better deal for their nation or their specific industry, despite the harm caused to the larger working class. For example, postal workers and auto workers in the U.S. and Canada are facing the same attacks, yet they are divided by a national border and organized into different unions. Fighting separately increases their risk of defeat.

Sectional interests create conflict among different unions and inside unions. UAW President Shawn Fain and Teamsters President Sean O’Brien support U.S. tariffs. The International Trade Union Confederation (ITUC) and the International Longshore and Warehouse Union (ILWU) oppose them,

Tariffs are taxes. These and other reckless, shortsighted policies have begun to devastate American workers, harm critical sectors of the economy, and line the pockets of the ultra-wealthy at the expense of hardworking families. The tariffs have also sown distrust among our allies and inflamed geopolitical tensions. These tariffs are nothing more than a direct attack on the working class and should be opposed outright.

Nation-Building

In practice, ‘nation-building’ means supporting the wealth and power of the national capitalist class by making people work harder and longer for less.

Nations need a strong industrial base to compete in a global economy. The capital to finance the British Empire was extracted from workers during the Industrial Revolution.

After defeating the 1917 workers’ revolution, Russia’s new rulers completed their capitalist revolution. They used forced labour and mass starvation to build an industrial economy strong enough to compete with the United States.

The Trump regime aims to re-build U.S. manufacturing by crushing unions, scrapping industrial regulations, and ending social and environmental protections.

To weaken working-class resistance, Trump is targeting working-class migrants and gender rebels, criminalizing dissent, abolishing civil rights, and massively expanding police and prison systems. To stay competitive, every nation must do the same.

Canada’s Prime Minister Mark Carney plans to “bring together labour, business, and civil society… To build the strongest economy in the G7.”

Canadian nationalism is really about protecting the wealth-building power of Canadian capitalists.

For every $100 of wealth created in the last 10 years in Canada, $34 has gone to the richest 1 percent and only $5 to the bottom 50 percent. The top one per cent of Canadians control an astounding 26 percent of the country’s wealth.

Where Trump is plunging his knife into the heart of the U.S. working class, Carney will stab Canada’s workers in the back. As he warned, “I want to be clear, the coming days and months will be challenging, and they will call for some sacrifices.”

These sacrifices will not be shared. They will be born primarily by the working class.

The Nationalist Trap

Globalization benefits larger corporations that can compete in the global market. Nationalism benefits smaller corporations that rely on trade barriers to protect them from foreign competition. Relieved from the pressure to innovate, protected companies become less competitive. Their products cost more than foreign imports, raising prices and causing job loss downstream.

National unity requires workers to embrace the capitalist agenda as their own. This means supporting domestic policies that prioritize corporate profits over raising living standards, and it means backing foreign policies that victimize foreign workers. Working-class loyalty to the nation is not rewarded. On the contrary, working conditions deteriorate and living standards fall.

Genuine national independence is impossible in a global capitalist economy.

Governments that resist foreign domination can have their governments overthrown and their leaders assassinated, or their nations invaded and occupied by imperial powers. They can be forced into submission by a banking system that saddles them with crippling debt and by structural adjustment programs that demand privatization and deregulation to open their economies to foreign corporate control.

National-liberation struggles hope to replace foreign masters with home-grown ones in the belief they will be more responsive to people’s needs. However, all nations are compelled to compete in the imperialist system. To succeed, they must exploit their natural resources and their labour force or surrender them to foreign exploitation. Either way, workers are screwed.

Ukraine sought U.S. help to escape Russian imperialism. After half a million dead, Ukrainians have exchanged Russian masters for American ones.

Vietnam endured decades of war to achieve national independence. It then became a nation of sweatshops producing cheap goods for the global market. Now it faces industry-destroying US tariffs.

That doesn’t mean it’s useless to fight imperialism.

Social movements against any form of oppression can mobilize the working class. Once workers move into action, they can push past the upper classes to take power on their own behalf. Through this process of continuing or permanent revolution, workers can use anti-imperialist movements as a means to build their power to end all forms of capitalist rule.

Is China Better?

China is extremely effective at generating capital.

No ‘free-market’ form of capitalism can compete with China’s state-driven economy. While U.S. capitalists squabble over policy and struggle to finance industry, the Chinese State unifies its capitalist class behind major, long-term projects that are massively funded by the State. Merging the capitalist class with the State fueled China’s rapid rise to become the world’s dominant manufacturing power.

China’s manufacturing sector is now larger than that of the United States, Germany, Japan, South Korea, and Britain put together. In 5 years, China is expected to account for 45 percent of all global manufacturing, a level of dominance seen only twice before, by the United Kingdom at the start of the Industrial Revolution and by the United States after World War II.

MYTH: China is a communist, socialist, or workers’ State.

It is commonly believed that capitalism requires a ‘free market,’ so State-directed economies must be socialist or communist. The fact that ‘Communist China’ lifted millions of people out of poverty is offered as evidence that China is some kind of worker’s State. However, industrialization itself raises wages and living standards.

FACT: China is a capitalist state.

The defining feature of capitalism is the existence of a ruling class that grows wealthy by extracting capital from a waged working class.

Simply put, capitalism prioritizes wealth accumulation over meeting people’s needs. By that definition, all existing States are capitalist States.

The capitalist system enables the ruling class to confiscate most of the wealth that workers produce. China boasts 516 billionaires, placing it second only to the United States, while consumption-per-capita (a measure of living standards) stands 40 percent below what would be expected in a nation that produces so much wealth.

The Chinese State is very effective at restraining workers’ demands. It is illegal for workers in China to organize in their own interests. The only legally-allowed workers’ organization is the State-run All-China Federation of Trade Unions (ACFTU). State control makes it difficult for workers in China to raise their standard of living. Nevertheless, they rebel,

In the 2023 strike wave, workers used diverse tactics to pressure their bosses, including work stoppage, assembly, sit-ins, blocking factory entrances, guarding machines, and suicide attempts. Their resilience was evidenced by the duration of their actions, with some struggles lasting for several months.

The bottom line is this: No matter which empire rules the world, humanity has no future under capitalism.

Globalization and Nationalism: Two Sides of the Capitalist Coin

Capitalist-driven globalization will continue to impoverish people and destroy the environment to make the rich even richer.

Retreating behind nationalist walls cannot protect us. Tariff wars raise the cost of living, disrupt the global chain of production, cause massive job loss, and trigger economic recession. When trade wars escalate, military wars follow.

Does it really matter whether our masters are Canadian, American, or Chinese? Are we willing to die to protect the nationality of those who profit from our labour and leave us with crumbs?

Neither globalization nor nationalism can solve our problems. Our only escape is to think outside the capitalist box.

Working-Class Internationalism

Workers in every nation face the same class enemy. Their most reliable allies are their fellow workers around the world, not their bosses, their bosses’ State, or the union establishment that collaborates with both.

International chains of production link workers around the world. By taking collective control of production, the working class could create a global economy managed by all the world’s people for everyone’s benefit. We get a glimpse of this possibility in cross-border solidarity actions,

Instead of letting companies pit plants and workers against each other, unions in France, Belgium, Austria, Italy, and Germany negotiated a “multinational-union agreement” that forced their common employer, a Belgian and French glass company, to distribute work among subsidiaries in different countries.

Worker solidarity can interrupt war. Responding to the appeal from Palestinian trade unions, the Moroccan Union of Port Workers refused to handle military cargo bound for Israel, stating,

Anyone facilitating this ship’s passage is, without question, an accomplice in the genocidal war against the Palestinian people.

Wins Build on Wins

The entire capitalist system is structured to prevent workers from exercising power. It doesn’t always succeed.

Sick of war and deprivation, the working class took power in Russia in 1917, inspiring a wave of workers’ uprisings around the world, including the 1919 Seattle and Winnipeg General Strikes. Tragically, the working class were not strong enough to prevail and were defeated.

During the Great Depression, the 1934 Minneapolis Teamsters Strike and the 1936-37 strike to unionize General Motors reminded workers what was possible.

Workers gained confidence after our victory because if we could force the largest industrial giant in the whole world to its knees, then they could win, too. The initials CIO [Congress of Industrial Organizations] stood for power. You’d see posters in homes and on cars proudly proclaiming, “I am the CIO.” Those three letters had great significance. I’ve never known anything else as powerful.

As each win inspired the next, a flood of union organizing swept through the transportation and auto industries. Even professional, commercial, and service workers wanted to unionize.

Again in the 1960s and 70s, a surge of workers’ rebellions circled the globe. Public-sector workers in Canada and the United States mounted illegal wildcat strikes that won the legal right to unionize and major improvements in wages and working conditions.

Rebuilding the Confidence to Fight

The capitalist class have buried the history of working-class rebellion, and they discourage resistance by insisting there is no alternative to their system.

Since the 1980s, workers have suffered decades of defeats and betrayals that have lowered expectations of what they can achieve. Union officials and reform parties squander workers’ rage in useless appeals to the capitalist State. Politicians and the corporate media redirect workers’ anger against other workers who are falsely accused of stealing their jobs, overusing public services, causing housing shortages, and driving up the cost of living. These conditions encourage racist, right-wing ideas to grow among workers desperate for solutions.

We need to rebuild a Left current that can unite workers and direct their rage against capitalist rule. This means organizing workers independently from the union establishment and all capitalist political parties, including those that promise to reform the system.

We can rebuild a sense of class pride, class solidarity, and class power with three key principles:

• Defend ALL workers’ rights
• What we want for ourselves, we want for all
• Allow no one to advance at the expense of another

Defend ALL workers’ rights!

President Trump is not going after immigrants. He’s importing White immigrants from South Africa, and both his wife and Elon Musk are immigrants. Trump is targeting the immigrant section of the working class. If we let these workers go down, we will be next.

No group of workers benefits from the oppression of other workers, regardless of short-term bribery. Only by standing together can workers challenge their exploitation and end capitalist rule.

Any restriction on reproductive and personal choices is an attack on our right to control our lives. The State is not our guardian. It is our class enemy. Authorities who gain the power to control people’s choices have more power to keep us all down.

What we want for ourselves, we want for all

Capitalists insist that the economy is a zero-sum game, that if any worker gets more, it leaves less for the rest of us. They want us to resent those who demand better instead of applauding them for leading the way.

The only zero-sum game is between the classes. The more the bosses take, the less we have.

Between 2000 and 2019, Canadian governments lost $741 billion to tax cuts. That’s enough money to upgrade Québec’s and Ontario’s infrastructure and to pay for the COVID-19 related spike in Old Age Security, disability, unemployment, and childcare benefits, a year of government spending on health care, and the Canada Emergency Wage Subsidy.

There is more than enough for everyone. A win by any section of the working class raises the bar for us all.

Allow no one to advance at the expense of another

Workers must challenge class inequality in society and also in their unions. Union treasuries hold billions of dollars in assets while union members struggle to pay their bills.

Union bureaucracies cannot be reformed. Activists elected to officialdom cave to its pressures or are pushed out. Bureaucracies must be dismantled from below.

When workers take direct, collective control of their unions, they can ensure that,

• No union staff is paid more than the average wage of those they represent
• Union leaders are elected by open vote and subject to immediate recall by majority vote
• Bloated union funds are returned to members in the form of generous strike pay so workers can stay off the job until they win, and by supporting organizing drives in every workplace and industry

Worker-controlled unions are a threat to capitalist rule, and the bosses and their State will retaliate. However, a united working class are stronger. “Without our brain and muscle not a single wheel can turn.”

Conclusion

Globalization or nationalism? It’s a false choice. For over ten-thousand years, class societies have advanced the interests of rulers at the expense of the ruled. The international working class have grown powerful enough to abolish all forms of class rule locally, nationally, and internationally.

In our hands is placed a power greater than their hoarded gold,
Greater than the might of armies, magnified a thousand-fold.
We can bring to birth a new world from the ashes of the old,
For the union makes us strong.