Eric Lee: Ukraine and the world’s unions — the view from Kyiv

Eric Lee discusses Ukraine and the world’s unions — the view from Kyiv

Ukrainian trade unionists cannot understand why some of their brothers and sisters — for example, those in COSATU — who helped bring down a fascist regime in their own country would today be supporting a fascist regime somewhere else. They cannot understand why people in former colonies are not supporting Ukraine in what is clearly an anti-colonial struggle against a brutal, imperialist enemy.

Ukrainian workers and their unions remain defiant. They want and expect their fellow workers and unions around the world to stand with them, in solidarity. It is the very least that we can do.

Emphasis Mine

Lee has forgotten the history leading up to World War 1 in which the international worker solidarity was smashed by nationalism. Megan Trudell writes in Prelude to Revolution: Class Consciousness and the First World War:

Such a cataclysm was bound to create social shock waves that would rock the world’s ruling classes. But it certainly did not appear at the start that revolutions would be a result of the conflict. The strength of nationalist feeling in the first year of the war is an aspect of the war that perplexes many – why was the patriotic frenzy so great and why did so many workers volunteer to fight so enthusiastically? The notion that nationalism is all powerful is often used to bolster the argument that all the ruling class has to do is wave the flag and workers will flock behind it. It is an argument not restricted to the First World War but one encountered during every subsequent war – right up to the modern examples of the Falklands, the Gulf and Bosnia. The question of whether or not nationalism is a more powerful impulse than class identification is therefore utterly bound up with any account of the war.

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The same period also saw the growth of the national idea in the more established capitalist states, where, for example, a ‘new celebration of British nationalism, with the establishment, for the first time, of a state run educational system that indoctrinated children in the glories of “national” history, the writing of nationalist popular novels, plays, poetry and songs by literary admirers of the empire and the conscious invention of traditions aimed at encouraging popular identification with the monarchy’.

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In part this enthusiasm was a response to ruling class propaganda about the nature of the war. Every ruling class involved argued the war was one of national defence. Germany was defending itself from Russian aggression, France from German militarism. Britain was defending ‘poor little Belgium’. Each ruling class pushed the idea that there was an outside threat to the democratic rights enjoyed by the nation’s citizens, and in part the response of each country’s working class was an identification with one’s nation and a desire to protect one’s way of life.

But it wasn’t a straightforward calculation on the part of the ruling classes involved. Such had been the scale of domestic crisis in most of the countries involved that it was not at all obvious that workers would respond to the call to arms. In Britain, against a background of social upheaval and a potentially explosive situation in Ireland where the pressure for Home Rule was mounting, the Liberal minister John Morley considered that ‘the atmosphere of war cannot be friendly to order in a democratic system that is verging on the humour of [18]48’. Ruling classes across the globe were in fact astonished by the scale of patriotic zeal. This should not be surprising: nationalism is not simply imposed from above, but has to in some way correspond to existing national sentiments among a section at least of the population – often the middle class – and grips the minds of the masses when other social change seems remote.

It is not simply the case that workers who had fought so hard for social change in the pre-war years suddenly turned their backs on their own struggles and were brainwashed by their respective governments. Much of their motivation can be traced precisely to the holding back, or even defeat, of such social struggles. The vision of war came to seem as if it were an alternative way of dramatically transforming society. Magnus Hirschfeld described the response to the declaration of war as ‘a discharge of tensions that had built up for years’. Ferro argues that the ‘worker of 1914, going off to war, had found a substitute for revolutionary hopes.’ Many workers went to fight with ‘an image of war as the antithesis of the boredom, materiality and mechanisation of every day life’. …

Emphasis Mine

We are seeing the same patterns now. There has been fifty years of retreat of workers' solidarity within countries with the advance of neo-liberalism. And the retreat of international solidarity with the advance of offshoring through globalism, and the refugee crises. Workers are being pitted against each other within countries and between countries.