Against all national flags!

Those taking part in the demonstrations against asylum seekers and refugees in Britain, deluded into blaming ‘foreigners’ for everything bad from cuts in welfare to the endangering of children, have presented themselves as true patriots by waving the Union Jack and the Cross of St George. The England flag in particular is festooning lamp-posts or being painted onto walls and roundabouts. The meaning is plain: some of us have the right to live here, foreigners and/or ‘illegals’ should get out. A perfect application of the need of the exploiting class to divide the exploited against each other.

In the US, where brutal mass deportations are already underway, some of those targeted by the same racist logic are also waving flags. Sometimes the US flag to show that immigrants can also be patriots, sometimes the flag of Mexico or other Latin American countries, because so many of the workers hit by the ICE raids come from those countries.

The idea that the exploited themselves should show that they are loyal to this or that national flag is not new. In 1912, in the USA, the striking Lawrence textile workers, many of them newly arrived immigrants, also waved the Stars and Stripes in response to the accusation that they were un-American, outside troublemakers. But the Industrial Workers of the World, who supported the strike, did not hesitate to criticise this approach in an article entitled “The Flag of the Free” (Industrial Worker, 21 March 1912)[1]:

“The flag of the free, bosh!

Thousands of Lawrence strikers and hundreds in the crowd at San Diego will have found out that the only patriotism that Capitalism recognizes is profit patriotism—dollar patriotism. And the hundreds of thousands who read and are told of the affairs will see the true meaning of idolatrous respect for the masters' bit of cloth.

The flag is but a bandage over the eyes of labor”.

We can only agree: all national flags are the masters’ rags! A bandage over our eyes, blinding us to the reality that the working class has no country, that the nation always belongs to those who have accumulated the wealth, the political power, and the most powerful guns. In short, to the ruling class. Two years after the article the IWW would have added that the American flag is a means to enlist the workers into the slaughter of imperialist war, alongside the British Union Jack and the tricoleurs of France or Germany.

And this is why revolutionaries are against all national flags. Not only the flags of the most powerful imperialist states, but also the flags of the ‘oppressed nations’, such as Ukraine or Palestine, which can only ‘resist’ the domination of one power by allying themselves with other imperialisms. In the case of Ukraine, the American and Western European states, in the case of Palestine and Hamas, the Islamic regime of Iran, among others.  

Against all national flags and divisions, for the international unity of the working class!

Amos

 

 

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[1] This article was brought to our attention by a comrade who signs himself adri on the libcom discussion forum. Along with another comrade, msommer, who identifies as a council communist, they were criticising anarchists in the US who justify the waving of Mexican and Palestinian flags in demonstrations because they operate as symbols of the fight against oppression, whereas in reality they are a means to trap workers in bourgeois politics. See https://libcom.org/discussion/are-anarchist-organisations-decli