WeeklyWorker

12.02.2026
Nationalism cannot be combatted by administrative solutions

Not nationalism but regionalism

Having rightly opposed the illusions in nationalism in Your Party Scotland, Peter Kennedy proposes his own recipe for the future

Against the backdrop of Your Party in the UK, Scotland and Wales there arises the issue of how to locate all three within the UK political landscape.

The context gives succour to socialists committed to national independence as a shortcut to socialism, but it also opens up other solutions. One of them is for socialists to promote a regional-based political movement that erases national divisions and enhances democratic accountability. This short intervention critiques national independence projects and considers the socialist possibilities of regional assemblies.

The incongruous pairing of nationalism with socialism over the course of the past hundred years has left the working class movement in a politically pitiful state. During the cold war era, working class capacity to act for itself was decapitated by international capitalists in the west placating and dividing the working class with ‘national roads to socialism’ in the form of social democracy. Meanwhile the Stalinist USSR used tanks to bring ‘socialism in one country’ to eastern Europe workers, while also reinforcing the idea that social democracy in the west was on the road to socialism in one country, as a matter of appeasement with western capitalism.1

Horizons

Post-Stalinism and post-social democracy, the conflation of nationalism and socialism continues to bring benefits to international capitalism, circumventing the movement to actual socialism and containing the working class within nationalist horizons - pinned in by international capital through sanctions, blockades or more direct interventions. In such cases, the ideology of ‘socialism in one country’ helps to placate a population whose living standards have been worsened.

As we know, there are no post-independence nation-states in existence that promote workers' power in transition to socialism. What we see are various authoritarian bureaucracies, from China to Cuba, lording it over the working class, or creating ethnic and national divisions as a basis of social control in support of ‘managing capitalism’ or versions of Stalinism. And, as we ought to know, the pull of national independence adventures today fills the chaos left in the wake of a declining capitalism, headed by US imperialism. The decline itself has come about because of the failure of the socialist left and the working class to abolish capitalism. Capitalism and the capitalist class now operate across and beyond nation-states through transnational entities under the control of finance-capital elites, committed to war and barbarism to defend the dying embers of the capitalist mode of production. The idea of a world where national self-determination is possible is an idea without reality.

Instead, we exist in a capitalist world in which US imperialism overrides ‘the right of self-determination’ of other imperial powers, including the UK and EU nation-states, with respect to what it will do with Greenland, or where European powers can invest capital in US armaments, hi-tech … (and, where they cannot, in Chinese hi-tech)2 and how much they can spend on welfare over warfare, and so on. If this is so with developed capitalist states, then smaller states can only leave the working class even more exposed.

In this context, nations and national projects, republics included, are containers of capitalist exploitation. The working class as a class in itself can only develop fully for itself in a social form within which its economics, politics and ideas find expression. The nation-state, even one labelled ‘socialist republic’, is not this form.

So much we know, but have arguably not learned from. Socialists today are still hooked on the notion that national independence offers a short cut to socialism. The development of Your Party, YP Scotland and YP Wales presents yet another opportunity for socialists fixated on illusory short cuts to press their case for national independence.3 They are drawn to the argument that the three Your Parties that have emerged so far in Scotland, Wales and England ought to be framed as separate independent national parties.

Their case for independence is dressed up in terms of a ‘socialist republic’ or ‘democratic republic’, with a focus on constitutional change.4 It amounts to the same thing; sowing illusions in short cuts to socialism and conflating national solutions for capitalist problems for which the working class usually has to pick up the bill. They claim that the working class of Scotland is more leftwing and that is why they call for independence.

Yet surveys show similar beliefs between people in Scotland and those in the wider UK, when asked what needs to change for the better.5 Most people give more or less the same answers across the UK: better access to healthcare, employment and wages, housing, transport, all of which amount to minimal reforms within capitalism.

The one difference is that sections of the Scottish and Welsh working class have been sold the illusion that independence might improve things. Socialists advocating Scottish independence, no matter how well-meaning, have promoted this illusion - to the benefit of the Scottish National Party, not the working class of Scotland. There is also no basis for the view that Scotland is more radical or more oriented towards socialism than the rest of the UK and can therefore be the vanguard of radical change.

In summary, there is no basis for socialism in nationalism. National independence, no matter how it is dressed up, only serves to fragment working class unity, such as it is, and sustain conditions of capitalist exploitation and alienation.

Assemblies

While socialism can only come into being internationally, the working class must act locally if it is to become a reality. The working class must certainly break with the British capitalist state and monarchic trappings and establish socialist governance across the UK, of course, but not create more problems with smaller independent nation-states.

In this respect, if YP as a mass workers’ party were ever to take power, democratic socialism would be best served by prioritising regions over nations. The political gelling agent (to take power and to unify regions) would be a clear socialist programme, with minimum demands and maximum aims to abolish capitalism and embark on the transition to socialism.

On this basis we might envisage each region being based around numerous branches. And each region would have their own regional assembly, which would link to three principal assemblies - autonomously related with equal powers, in Cardiff, Edinburgh and London, say. The three principal assemblies would be linked in turn to a central assembly.

Democratic accountability would flow from local branches to regional assemblies, to principal assemblies, to the central assembly, cutting across existing national boundaries and unifying the working class. Issues arising from specific forms of oppression and inequality, due to historic national differences engineered by capitalism, would more likely be resolved within the regional assemblies and principal assembly.

Moreover, grassroots-led, democratically accountable, regional power would ensure nationalist ties are erased, rather than allowed to prosper, and allow socialist ties to be strengthened. It would clearly empower the working class to begin to erase severe regional economic inequalities caused by capitalism, and create new arenas for democratic socialist politics.

In sum, working class unity and democracy would be enhanced if we break up the unitary state and simultaneously regenerate it along regionally-based, democratic socialist lines, in ways that erase national divisions.

Whatever spatial organisational forms we adopt, what is certain is that any mass working class party (which we hope the fledgling YP might aspire to be) must challenge national divisions by developing organisational forms along spatial lines that erase the significance of nations and the incumbent threat of nationalism.

Members of Your Party in Scotland, England and Wales should not rush headlong into carving the political space into separate nations. More time should be given for democratic debate and discussion as to which organisational forms and spatial politics best unify the working class in the struggles ahead.

One suggestion presented here is to consider the democratic possibilities for advancing socialism, premised on regional rather than national lines, and guided by one vital aim above all else: building working class unity across the UK space and internationally, to develop in lockstep towards the socialist transformation of society.

Obviously, this would be a complex undertaking that would require the power of a united working class in a determined struggle with the ruling capitalist class - not to mention time, careful thought, good faith and creative thinking. But it is absolutely vital if Your Party is ever to amount to a mass workers’ party with powers to shift society beyond the wreckage of a late and moribund capitalism towards socialism.

  1. See my article, ‘Labourism and social democracy post-1945’ Critique 35, 2004.↩︎

  2. www.thenewfederalist.eu/europe-in-the-shadows-of-the-new-american-empire-part-iii-the-european?lang=fr.↩︎

  3. B Goupillot and R Green, ‘Forging Your Party: forging a new Scottish Socialist Party’: heckle.scot/2025/12/your-party-forging-a-new-scottish-socialist-party.↩︎

  4. Republican Socialist Platform, ‘What we decided at our 2025 AGM’: republicansocialists.scot/2025/10/what-we-decided-at-our-2025-agm.↩︎

  5. Ipsos ‘35 years of Scottish attitudes towards independence’: www.ipsos.com/en-uk/35-years-scottish-attitudes-towards-independence.↩︎