Neue Debatte - Special Edition - Long Essay on Left Strategy #002 - 04/2017 | Page 22

3 On nations and global capitalism
mocracy. Sovereignty, whatever this might be, had gone over from
sacrosanct absolutist rulers to the people, the demos – in theoretical
teaching!
Having played an active part in bourgeois uprisings, rebellions and
the great revolutions the fighting lower classes were counted as fel-
low citizens. But when the middle classes had taken over the state
and it’s judicial, political and military power the so called Fourth Es-
tate, the low working people, was degraded again to what it had ever
been in history, an exploited, miserable mass without rights. They
were still citizens but as wage workers in a heavily industrialising
economy these ‘free citizens’ had to sell themselves to a capitalist.
They were free to change their employing exploiter, but not their sta-
tus. They saw their fellow workers in other companies and countries
suffering from the same hardships and learned to organize for their
own interests.
Every single worker was taught by life that he was strong when unit-
ed with his comrades. Their social and political improvement could
only be achieved against violent resistance of the bosses. The fighting
proletarian movements got to know the state, the police, the armed
forces, the judges, and the politicians as a regime against them. They
weren’t citizens any longer but denounced as enemies of civilisation.
The workers on strike got locked-out by the industrialists, their meet-
ings scattered and their manifestations bludgeoned. The socialist par-
ties were regularly illegalized and their leader arrested. But they en-
forced their franchise, though at first being restricted by a census lim-
ited three-class franchise system. Nevertheless they succeeded in
elections and gained seats in parliaments. The workers’ organisations
had to be considered in social and political issues.
Of cause there was no lack of attempts to corrupt the workers’ rep-
resentatives. Yet the mightiest weapon of the ruling classes to alien-
ate the lower classes from themselves was the imagined nation. The
frantic national “WE”-unity of interests and thus the people’s identi-
fication with their antagonistic opponents made the people national-
ist puppets