Workers of All Lands Unite ? Conference
University of Nottingham, 07.03.2015

Reflections on Working Class Nationalism and Internationalism
by Dan Gallin


Comrades and Friends,
Thank you for having invited me to this event, we need many opportunities to discuss the future of our movement and this is a serious one.
Workers of All Lands Unite? The question mark is the really significant sign of this conference. Why a question mark? In this meeting it is unlikely that anyone would believe that workers shouldn’t unite, so what are we questioning? The meaning of unity, based on internationalism? the possibility itself of such unity, or the possibility of it ever prevailing?
It is easy to forget that in fact the movement has never been united, the First International was already riven by conflict from the start, eventually by conflicts between followers of Marx and followers of Bakunin. This division persisted in the early years of the Second International, which then splintered further following the First World War and the Bolshevik Revolution in Russia, leading to further splits.
But some divisions are more challenging than others. It makes a lot of sense to have framed this discussion in terms of a polar dichotomy between nationalism and internationalism.
Working class unity across borders is based on the recognition that there is an overriding common class interest that is a stronger bond than any that may tie workers to other interests, economic, ideological or national.
This principle – actually the recognition of a fact – is the shared ideological basis of the labour movement, including all of its tendencies, and of course of socialism, regardless of factional infighting over the years or centuries. Many times it has been acknowledged more in breach than in observance, but. the sense of this common class interest always re-emerged after an eclipse. If this principle were not based on reality, the international labour movement would have ceased to exist long ago.
Nationalism has been and remains the principal challenge to this world view, far more dangerous and destructive than factional differences between people who share the same world view and only differ on interpretation. Nationalism was the groundswell that swept all before it in 1914, paralyzing the labour movement of its time, and it was nationalism again, in its most reactionary forms, that set off World War II and again obliterated the labour movement in most of Europe and some of Asia.
Can nationalism ever be reconciled with internationalism? This is an old debate and I can see from the program that we will continue the debate right here, but in short I think it can be said that the nationalism of the oppressed and colonized has often been endorsed and supported by the internationalist movements of the Left, and legitimized against the nationalism of the oppressors. This too has never been as simple as it sounds, and the disappointments have been many.
how many of us have fought in alliance with national liberation movements that ended up liberating no one but instead created new structures of oppression? How many times did we have to be reminded of the famous quote by William Morris, about how things we fight for come about despite our defeats, and then turn out to be not what we meant, and others have to fight for what we meant under another name?
I want to discuss with you what seems to me to be among the most significant battles for internationalism of the past century. They are all battles against nationalism in its different forms and they are all an assertion of the common class interest that unites workers, battles against policies that deny such a common interest.
But they are also more than that: in addition, they are also invariably battles for democracy, in the first place in the labour movement itself and, further, for democracy and freedom in society at large. In that sense they have been battles for the soul of the labour movement and for the soul of socialism.
The first protagonist in this fight was Edo Fimmen, a Dutch trade unionist who played a crucial role as general secretary of the ITF, the International Transport Workers’ Federation, from 1919 to his death in 1942.
The ITF was in the inter-war period the most powerful of the International Trade Secretariats and the only one with world-wide relevance not only in intention but in actual fact, largely through its seafarers’ membership. Fimmen was in the right place at the right time. In contrast with the political movement, the trade union movement, in its long history, has produced remarkably few theoreticians and independent thinkers. In the inter-war period, Fimmen is the only one – and, at the same time, the leader for about twenty years of the most significant international labour organization of the time.
Eduard Carl (Edo) Fimmen was born in Amsterdam in 1881 and died in Cuernavaca, Mexico, in 1942. He had a Dutch protestant family background and joined a white collar workers’ union in1903, became its secretary in 1907 and the editor of its paper in 1909. Since 1907 he had also become active in the newly-formed social-democratic Dutch Confederation of Trade Unions, the NVV, and was its first secretary between 1915 and 1919. In 1909, he joined the Dutch Social-Democratic Labour Party, evolving rapidly to its Left.
During the first world war, the International Federation of Trade Unions (IFTU) and the International Transport Workers’ Federation (ITF) had established a liaison office in Amsterdam to maintain international trade union contacts, in an effort to overcome the deep political splits created by the war. This office was placed under the joint responsibility of Fimmen and Jan Oudegeest, another Dutch trade unionist, much less radical than Fimmen. At the end of the war, both organizations moved their headquarters to Amsterdam. In 1919, Fimmen, jointly with Oudegeest, was first post-war secretary of the IFTU and provisional secretary of the ITF.
He soon got into trouble at the IFTU. In January 1923 the French and Belgian armies occupied Germany’s Western province, the Ruhr, its industrial heartland, on the grounds of collecting payment of reparations agreed on in the Versailles treaties, which Germany was unable to pay. The threat of such an action had been public knowledge for some three years, and had been discussed in the international trade union movement, with an emerging consensus that it had to be opposed by all available means. The IFTU had called a World Peace Congress a few weeks earlier, and had decided to oppose any such move by a general strike of the German, Belgian and French unions.
In the event, nothing happened and nobody moved. Fimmen tried, unsuccessfully, to organize an international protest strike and, faced with the lack of any substantial support, attacked the European trade union elite in a bitter editorial in the ITF journal, entitled “Black January”.
He noted that the European working class was mostly “asleep” and passive because hobbled in nationalist thinking, but he reserved his most violent attacks for the trade union officials who had failed to lead their members out of this nationalism, thus failed in their duties and failed to act on their commitments to conduct the international struggle against war and against the danger of war.
The break between Fimmen and the IFTU came that year, partly as a result of the failure of the solidarity action on the occupation of the Ruhr, partly because Fimmen, against a majority of IFTU affiliates, advocated closer co-operation with the Soviet trade unions. He hoped to bring them into the IFTU, thereby re-establishing the de facto unity of the international trade union movement.
In the event, the only instance where a Soviet trade union joined, not the IFTU but an ITS, was that of the Soviet food workers’ union affiliating to the Food Workers’ International, the IUF (from 1923 to 1929).
The conflict with the IFTU majority in 1923 left Fimmen with a lasting mistrust of the capacity of an international based on national trade union centers to lead international labour struggles. He perceived the primarily national focus of national trade union centers as fundamental obstacle to effective international trade union action. Henceforth, he considered the International Trade Secretariats (ITS), as the real bearers of an international trade union perspective and as the only organisations capable of effective international trade union action.
Fimmen therefore advocated an organisational reform of the international trade union movement. Realising that his own best-case scenario (replacing the IFTU by a new international composed of the ITS) was politically impractical, he advocated a new IFTU based on both territorial units (the national centers) and international industrial federations (the ITS). These ideas are set out in his book Labour’s Alternative: the United States of Europe or Europe Limited, published in 1924.
Labour’s Alternative is a prophetic book. In 1924, Fimmen anticipated developments such as the European Union and the globalisation of the world economy. He starts out with an analysis of the concentration and internationalisation of capital, moving on to argue that the labour movement would be unable to develop an appropriate international response as long as its main organisation, the IFTU, would remain based on national trade union centers rather than the ITSs. He predicted that:
“just as the development of capitalism has always determined the organisational form of its opponents, has given rise first of all to local and subsequently to national trade unions, so capitalism will become, if not the originator, at least the furtherer of the international organisation of industrial workers.”
He then goes on to elaborate on this thought:
“Therewith the ITS, which will have to conduct these international struggles, will acquire increasing importance as compared with the national centres. In the period when capitalism was expanding in the direction of national organisation, the conduct of industrial struggle passed from the control of local trade unions to that of national trade unions.
“So now, in the struggle which has begun with the world war and its sequel, the leadership must pass from the national organisations to the International Trade Secretariats.
“Just as, during the former period, the importance of the concentration of local organisations (the trades councils) became small as compared with the importance of the national trade unions, so today the influence of the national centres as concentrations of the trade unions of a particular country will grow less than the influence of the ITSs and the task of the national centres will tend to become restricted to administrative (though national) duties similar to those administrative duties which are today performed by the trades councils.”
Fimmen was under no illusion on the capacity of the ITSs of his time to rise to what he considered to be their historical tasks:
“We are still far short of this point”, he wrote. “Several years are likely to elapse before the ITSs (which are still in the very earliest stage of their activity, and most of which are as yet devoid of substantial importance) will have won, practically as well as theoretically, the leadership in industrial struggles.”
Ninety years later, after a second world war and the subsequent Cold War set the labour movement back for decades, many ITSs, now re-named GUFs, and not necessarily the smallest, are still “devoid of substantial importance” in terms of their capability of successfully conducting international labour struggles.
Fimmen’s conclusion remains open-ended, in the same way as others, before and after him, have posed the alternative as between socialism and barbarism:
“Still, however weak and imperfect in respect of organisation the ITSs may be, however little international, nonetheless the development of capitalism will compel them to take up the task that is incumbent on them unless the proletariat is to lapse internationally into a condition of more hopeless dependence and enslavement than that of the working class in its national subdivisions today.”
Ninety years later, we can only say that this story is not over and its outcome remains in doubt.
A word about politics, because Fimmen’s approach would not be understandable without an understanding of the nature of his socialist politics.
Fimmen was not a syndicalist, I think he could best be described as a revolutionary reformist.
Although forced to step down as IFTU general secretary, Fimmen retained the position of general secretary of the ITF, where a left-wing majority supported him. also in the ITF his views were controversial and met on different occasions with strong opposition from mainstream social-democratic member unions but he retained his position until his death in 1942.
Fimmen’s political involvement caused him twice to almost lose this position. The first time in 1926, because of his support of a left-wing publishing project in Belgium and his contribution to periodicals which advocated unity between social-democratic and communist unions and published attacks on the social-democratic trade union leadership. The second time was when, after participating in the publication of the left-wing socialist weekly De Socialist in the Netherlands in 1928, he accepted, in 1932, the chairmanship of the newly-founded Independent Socialist Party (Onafhankelijke Socialistische Partij, OSP) a left-wing split from the SDAP.
The OSP, a member party of the London Bureau, merged with Sneevliet’s Revolutionary Socialist Party in 1935 to form the Revolutionary Socialist Workers’ Party RSAP, which briefly affiliated to the Fourth International. Under the pressure of the governing bodies of the ITF, Fimmen agreed to step down as OSP chairman and to abstain from active party politics.
At the same time he continued to actively and practically support anti-fascist resistance movements throughout Europe through the ITF. This included anti-fascist protest campaigns in Italy, the construction of an extensive illegal resistance network of transport (mainly railway) unions in Nazi Germany (after having failed to move the IFTU and the German trade unions to actively opposing the Nazi takeover in 1933), support for the socialist resistance against Austro-Fascism after 1934, and significant material assistance to the republican forces in the Spanish civil war.
Here, once more, Fimmen ran up against nationalism in its crudest forms. He was seeking to organize an international boycott against Franco Spain, while at the same time supporting supplies of arms to the Republic, and was aided in this by the Scandinavian unions.
But an extension of the boycott failed due to the opposition of the British trade union leadership who imposed a veto and threatened to pull our of the ITF if a boycott of arms shipments to Franco Spain was carried out. They appeared to Fimmen to be almost official representatives of the British Foreign Office with its policy of non-intervention. Fimmen then tried to contact local branches of the British affiliates to enlist their support, but apparently did not get very far.
When the second world war broke out, Fimmen supervised the move from Amsterdam to London and stated: “The ITF is taking part in the war, not to back England and France, but to oppose Hitler and his open and secret allies.”
Since 1923, Fimmen had been a supporter of a united front policy, and of co-operation with the Soviet trade unions at least on specific important questions of common interest, such as anti-fascism. Like others, he had welcomed the October revolution in Russia as the ‘first step towards international revolution’ and defended the social experiment of the Soviet Union, albeit with increasing distance and criticism. The Moscow trials of 1936/38 and the Stalinist purges, and the repression against the POUM and the Left of the CNT during the Spanish civil war, caused Fimmen to break with Communism in its Stalinist form.
His close friend and comrade Willi Münzenberg, the director of Soviet propaganda in Western Europe, had broken with Moscow in 1939 over the Stalin-Hitler pact with an editorial titled: “The traitor, Stalin, is you!”. Münzenberg, interned by the French in 1940 as an “enemy alien” died under unclear circumstances that year, most likely murdered by a Soviet agent.
Fimmen died with a sense of unfinished business. In a letter shortly before his death, he wrote:
“When … I look back over my work of the last twenty-five years, I find that I have made many and great mistakes. But these mistakes, that load me with a heavy part of the responsibility for the defeat of European trade unions, do not consist in that I gave the wrong lead. They consist in the fact that I gave the right lead too feebly. The fact that I was very often alone with my opinion made me hesitate… It is true that I have called things by their names and divulged to the workers the shortcomings of their organisations. But where I dealt criticism, I should have dealt blows and where I spoke, I should have shouted.”
The main point I want to make about Fimmen is that there is coherence between his politics and his actions as a trade unionist, particularly as a trade union internationalist. It was socialism, in its independent Marxist form, that provided him with both the intellectual framework and the moral backbone to resist the pressures of nationalist conformity.
Without such an ideological framework, you can have international trade union organizations, even very large ones, but you cannot have international policies that show a way forward, nor can you have international action that is more than a feeble defensive reflex.
Look at today’s international trade union movement: it has never been so universal, never before in history has it been represented in all countries of the world except a few of the most extreme dictatorships. Despite unions representing less than 10 percent of the world’s workers, it has never been so large in numbers: 176 million members claimed by the ITUC, to which should be added a few more millions for the World Federation of Trade Unions (WFTU), which does not publish membership figures, and a few independents, maybe altogether 200 to 250 million.
Yet, at the same time, it has rarely seemed so irrelevant: no influence, no traction. What is missing is a political vision, an interpretation of the world and of society that can underpin a sense of direction, a sense of purpose.
The merger between the ICFTU and the WCL in 2006 was acquired by erasing the last vestiges of social-democratic politics that had survived in the ICFTU, as well as what were at one time progressive elements of WCL ideology, basically liberation theology. This was a merger based on the lowest political denominator, with the result that the ITUC today is adrift with no recognizable politics at all.
Influential staff at ITUC headquarters appear to believe that any organization in the world that calls itself a trade union is entitled to friendly consideration, and could be eligible for membership.
The government-controlled national confederation of Kazakhstan, a personal dictatorship, was almost accepted into membership soon after the violent suppression of a spontaneous strike of oil workers, with sixteen workers shot dead, but for the objections of some principled ITC affiliates, in particular the Russian KTR.
The ITUC general secretary, who calls herself a “proud woman of the Left”, and I am sure she is sincere when she says this, leads a delegation to China, coincidentally at the exact same time as the democracy movement in Hong Kong, partly led by an ITUC affiliate, is being repressed, and gets a very public photo opportunity of a handshake with a leader of the Chinese CP.
The largest affiliate of the ITUC, the National Federation of Trade Unions of Russia (FNPR), which had Putin and Medvedev lead its May Day procession in Moscow in 2012 and which supports Putin’s United Russia party, sent its vice president, Andreij Issaev, to bring the fraternal greetings of United Russia to the congress of the Front National in December, in Lyon.
The Front National is of course the leading fascist party in France and in Europe, and, like other fascist parties in Europe, has received millions of dollars from Russia last year, to boost it in the forthcoming French elections.
Could the ITUC tolerate one of its affiliates expressing very public support in that way for a fascist party? At least one affiliate of the ITUC I am aware of raised the issue with Sharan Burrow and didn’t get an answer. What happened next is that she arrived in Sochi early last month to participate in the congress of the FNPR, where she shared the platform with ideologists representing various brands of fascism, praised the role of the FNPR in the international trade union movement and said that Russia under Putin was at the forefront of the struggle against inequality in the world.
I am not making any of this up. All of this actually happened within a few short months. Any of this would have been absolutely scandalous and unthinkable in the movement even twenty or thirty years ago, not to speak of Fimmen’s time. In the event, nothing happened except the query from the Swiss unions, asking in effect, what the hell is going on, and not getting any answer.
Comrades, I want to be very serious now. We need to be very careful now, very vigilant, because what is happening here is not only a process of political degeneration, simply through the evacuation of political thinking, but also a process of moral degeneration that sets in when organizations become ends in themselves and their leadership have lost any sense of the original purpose of the exercise.
We need to recover our culture, and this is not only about internationalism, this goes much deeper, part of this process is re-establishing standards about socialist values, socialist morality and socialist conduct. Do not believe for a moment that notions like “honour” or “decency” are “bourgeois values”. They are not, These are universal values in civilized social relations, therefore also our values.
What is also lacking here is a sense of history. One cannot overestimate the importance of history. History creates identity, and for that reason it is not about the past but about the future. Those who have no past have no identity and therefore have no future.
I cannot leave this discussion about the conflicting relationships between internationalism and nationalism in the labour movement without a mention of the most important and most fateful of them all, the conflict between Stalinism and Trotskyism, eventually a conflict between Stalinism and all forms of internationalist socialism.
I do not want to dwell on this for any length because it has been discussed intensively in the movement for many years and there is little sense in elaborating on these discussions here. I do want to make two points, however:
I cannot think of a more pernicious notion ever invented in the socialist movement than that of “socialism in one country”. Apart from the fact that the adoption of this slogan signalled the reversal of the October Revolution, it supported the conceptual hijacking of the term “internationalism”, which became a code word for unconditional subordination to Russian nationalism , in the Comintern, in the RILU, later in the WFTU and in all the Stalinist front organizations.
Furthermore, it accredited the concept that there was such a thing as a “homeland of socialism”, some kind of promised land, like a shining city on the hill, basically a religious notion. Before the coming into existence of the USSR, no one needed a promised land, socialism existed in the hearts and minds of its followers. When Stalinism took over in the USSR every policy issue in the Communist movement had to be subordinated to the interests of the “homeland of socialism”, as defined by its rulers.
Eventually, when the USSR could no longer be defended by a significant part of the Stalinist Left, new promised lands took its place with the same pattern of unconditional subordination, starting with Yugoslavia, then, with a steadily decreasing degree of credibility, and not without elements of ridicule, China, Albania, Cuba, Vietnam, Nicaragua, now Venezuela, not to forget such grotesque and horrific examples as the Cambodia of the Khmer Rouges, or North Korea.
What Stalinism has done, and Maoism, which is an extreme form of Stalinism, is to create a political cargo cult where the spontaneous activity of working class movements is negated and socialism is brought about by external forces – in post-war Europe by the Russian army. This regime is then declared to be “really existing socialism” (the term originated in the GDR), as distinct from the unreal, non existent socialism which the rest of us believe in.
Despite the strong and profound internationalist culture of the Trotskyist movement, some of it has nonetheless become contaminated with the cargo cult theory of socialism, along with the police interpretation of history, which is another hallmark of Stalinism.
One has often heard about the extraordinary adaptability of capitalism, its ability to take different forms to ensure its survival. None of these qualities were attributed to Stalinism. We believed that, as a system, it had finally come to an end with the collapse of the USSR in 1991 and the disintegration of the Soviet bloc. Little did we know.
And we should have known. It was naïve to assume that the bureaucratic class that ruled the USSR would have just disappeared, or transformed itself overnight into a normal capitalist ruling class, approximately similar to the one we have in Europe or in North America.
What we got is Putinism. Under Putin, in the last 15 years, Russia has developed a form of kleptocratic capitalism, with huge fortunes being made by plundering public assets, and with the old ruling class seamlessly recycling into the new. The whole system is again held together by the KGB under another name, with the same criminal energy and with even fewer rules restraining it.
At the top of a steep pyramid, one man, the president, Putin, the former KGB colonel, now with almost total control, ruling a country where opponents are routinely assassinated with impunity, a country permanently at war, without obvious reason.
This is the heritage Stalinism left behind. You look at Putin’s Russia, and what do you see: a lawless dictatorship relying for its survival on lies and violence, constantly creating internal and external enemies, with Stalinist governing methods, with an ideology combining elements of Stalinism with the most reactionary theories of extreme nationalism, monarchism, racism, Eurasian fantasies, in a tight alliance with the Russian Orthodox Church, the most reactionary form of Christianity – I know, I was born Orthodox. This is as close to fascism as you can get.
You look at all of this and you have to tell yourself: the Whites have won. Yes, after nearly one hundred years, the Whites finally won the civil war. Trotsky and others used to speculate about the extent that Stalinism would increase the risk of a restoration of capitalism in the Soviet Union, they thought that there was a danger of capitalist forces overthrowing the government, never even imagining that in time Stalinism would itself evolve into this monstrous form of capitalism with elements of fascism.
Could it have turned out worse had the Whites actually won the civil war? Would the Whites have killed as many of our people than Stalin did, who killed far more Communists than Hitler? Would the Whites have killed twenty million people and established the same system of forced labour camps? Or would Russia have eventually evolved into something like Finland, where we actually did lose a civil war against the Whites, with 35,000 of our people dead in White concentration camps? Were the Mensheviks right after all? Many questions I hoped I would never have to ask myself.
The most astonishing twist in this story is perhaps what has happened to the Communist Parties. If you remember, the Communist parties were formed after the Bolshevik revolution as a revolutionary socialist alternative to the useless social-democratic parties which had joined the nationalist war camp, each in their own country, instead of opposing and preventing World War I.
The Communist International which these parties had created, under the leadership of the Russian party, looked on itself as the “party of world revolution” ad for decades after, despite all the twists and turns of the party line, the Communist parties were perceived, by their own members and by public opinion, as representing the Left of the labour movement.
Today these parties defend the Putin regime in Russia, which has not the remotest connection with any reputable socialist cause. Since the end of the 1920s, the Communist parties had become in effect the Russian parties, but there was at least a plausible historical explanation. Today, there is none, and they are still the Russian parties. Moreover, they do not seem to find it difficult to share this position with some corrupt social-democrats and most of the fascist parties in Europe, with whom they have nothing in common except knee-jerk anti-Americanism. They may be vying for a place at the Putin trough but they also appear to be losers in that competition.
Let us leave this depressing chapter. Before I conclude, I would like to tell you about my own brush with nationalism and internationalism in the labour movement.
I was a student in the United States in the early 1950s where I discovered socialism in the form of Max Shachtman’s Independent Socialist League, which at that time was still on the Justice Department’s list of the subversive organizations. Having attracted the attention of the authorities, I was given one month to leave the country, and found myself in Geneva (Switzerland) in March 1953. I remained active in the ISL as a foreign correspondent of Labor Action , and also in the Swiss Socialist Party.
In 1960 I heard that the general secretary of the Food Workers’ International, the IUF, based in Geneva, was looking for an assistant; I applied. and was hired as chief cook and bottle washer, without any thought of ever becoming general secretary of that organization.
However, about four years later I was warned by a comrade in another trade union International that we had been infiltrated by the CIA in Latin America. What to do? I discussed it with my general secretary, Juul Poulsen, a Danish social-democrat, and we decided that we had to eliminate that operation because the integrity of the organization was at stake. That meant a frontal conflict with the AFL-CIO, where the international department was run by Jay Lovestone, himself a subcontractor of the CIA. Poulsen asked me to prepare a report for the Executive Committee which met in October 1965. Meanwhile he visited our two major American affiliates, the meat industry unions, both left-wing unions.
The two American unions understood exactly what was happening and assured us of their support if we killed that operation. At the Executive, the discussion was short and the decision unanimous: we were shutting down our entire structure in Latin America.
The AFL-CIO didn’t know what had hit them and they started looking for the enemy. My FBI file surfaced and. then they knew. Two years later, at the IUF congress was supposed to elect a successor to the retiring general secretary. I decided to run because I felt that the decision we had taken could be reversed by another leadership and I had to defend it. The spokesman for the American delegation at the congress, representing the official AFL-CIO line, declared that if I was elected, the American unions would disaffiliate. Congress didn’t know what to do and referred the entire issue back to the governing bodies.
In the meantime, our two American meat unions had woken up and informed our Executive that if I was not elected they would disaffiliate. At the next congress, in 1970, I was elected unanimously with an American president, from the bakers’ union, who was supportive of the integrity and independence of the organization.
Here we had run up against nationalism in the form of collusion between trade union organizations and government agencies and we had been able to defeat it because of a residual internationalist conscience in the two unions representing a majority of our affiliates in the same country.
The question remains: who were the real patriots, those who would turn a labour organization into a tool of their government or those who defended the honour of their class as citizens of their country.
The second nationalist threat appeared in Europe in 1973, with the founding of the European Trade Union Confederation. This was a time when the European Union had become intent to build what they regarded as a European identity at all levels of society, including business, unions, other civil society institutions, and where such institutions did not exist, they had to be created.
The ETUC, initially constituted of the European affiliates of the ICFTU and the WCL, defined itself from the outset as independent of any international trade union organization. It was not to be, however, independent of the EU, on the contrary: rather than acting as a trade union lobby in the EU institutions, it became very quickly a lobby of the EU in the trade union movement.
In the IUF a group of European affiliates had constituted itself, initially as a Common Market Committee, then as an industrial federation of the ETUC and had declared heir independence from the IUF. Henceforth, they said, they alone would be responsible for international activities in Europe, the IUF could deal with Africa, Asia and the Americas.
So here the International was suddenly confronted by an independent body created out of its own affiliates and subsidized by the EU which claimed exclusive authority over European activities.
There was no way I could accept that as IUF general secretary. I was shocked at the staggering arrogance of the leadership of that European faction, who proclaimed that only Europe really mattered in the movement. I could see no difference between the nationalism of any European nation and that of a self-appointed collective European entity, just as grubby and discriminatory.
Countering this operation proved more complicated than getting rid of the CIA. Fortunately, a number of European affiliates were equally opposed to EU-funded European separatism. Our governing bodies, with a large majority including European unions, created a European regional organization under IUF Rules and declared this organization to be the legitimate representation of the European affiliates of the IUF.
What followed was a seven-years civil war in Europe, which we managed to contain so the organization would not be paralyzed and incapable of doing serious work. It was eventually resolved by a change in leadership in the leading European union, the German union, with a new president who believed that IUF interests had to be safeguarded over European regional concerns. Much the same, more or less at the same time, happened in the International Transport Workers’ Federation.
I tried to give you case studies on different ways nationalism can creep into the labour movement and destroy its ideological substance.
The big question before us now is the old question: what is to be done? And, as usual, it is a complicated question. It is complicated today because there is no one single obvious center representative of socialist internationalism, regardless of some sectarian claims, neither politically nor at trade union level.
How do we rebuild an effective international labour movement with a sense of mission consistent with its historical responsibility as perceived by its founders and by all those who fought and died for it?
It is not as though socialist internationalism has disappeared. Pockets of internationalism and of socialist consciousness are scattered all over the world, in unions and in political organizations. I believe it is useless at this time to attempt creating international organizations. We need to keep loose and flexible, connect what can be connected, move together where we can, but never force the pace. Forget the vanguard party, the network is the vanguard.
At the outbreak of World War II Victor Serge wrote of the “Invisible International”. What he meant was a network of small groups and individuals from a variety of revolutionary movements, targets of repression from both fascism and Stalinism, obliged to assist each other for survival and developing in that way a remarkably efficient network.
Without dramatizing or comparing our situation with that of Victor Serge in 1940, I think this is where we are at. Let us work at building the “Invisible International”, stay under the radar as long as we can, be as inclusive as we can, exercise practical solidarity wherever we can.
I have now told you all I could about nationalism and internationalism in the labour movement. I hope I have not been too long and that I have given material for a good discussion.