Introduction: the social theory and utopian ideology of internationalism

This is the 150th anniversary of the Communist Manifesto. It could also be considered the 150th anniversary of the doctrine and practice of labour and socialist internationalism. The 1840s-50s were a moment of take-off for industrial and national capitalism: a great wave of bourgeois, liberal and national revolutions had taken place in Europe in 1848; the industrial revolution was celebrated at the Great Exhibition of London in 1851. Words like revolution and internationalism were much in the air: one British publication declared against the projected Channel Tunnel (also 150 years before its time) because it might allow foreign internationalists to flood into Britain. 

Our present period sees the take-off of a globalised and informatised capitalism. Globalisation is demonstrated by the worldwide spread of capitalist economic, political, social and cultural relations, as well as by the disappearance of any competing model. Informatisation is exemplified in the worldwide production and use of computerised goods and services, the increasing replacement of the organisation by the network as the central capitalist relational form. 

Both periods witness waves of `internationalism’ - on behalf of both the dominant forces and oppositions to such. 150 years ago bourgeois and liberal cosmopolitanism - economic, political, cultural - was on the rise. So was that of labour, radical and democratic opposition to capital, state and empire (at that time, the old pre-capitalist ones). Today we see the global spread and domination of doctrines of economic neoliberalism, of political `interdependence’, of liberal democracy as sole political model, of cultural globalism. At the same time we see the rise of worldwide social movements - not always democratic or pluralistic - seeking global solutions to the global problems that globalisation has added to earlier capitalist ones. 

How should we, in our situation, address the internationalism of Marx and Engels? Does the internationalism of then have any message for an internationalism of now? 

In considering this matter we have an immediate problem. The Communist Manifesto of 1848 does not actually have a section on internationalism, and does not elsewhere have very much to say about it (this was, after all, the year of the bourgeois, liberal and national revolution). But the German Ideology of 1845-6 has one crucial passage. Together they provide us with the classical Marxist account of capitalist internationalisation, of labour and socialist internationalism. It is, actually, my opinion that there was little, if any, major development in Marxist theory of internationalism after these early statements. What we seem to rather get is up-dated reproduction, pragmatic adjustment or successive attenuation. 

The two documents (henceforth mostly the GI and the CM) are complementary in a number of ways. The first is philosophical, the second political. The first deals with the global level, the second with that of the nation-state. The first deals with communism primarily as historical transformation and social movement, the latter with it as programme and organisation. The first could be seen as reflective and theoretical, the latter as persuasive and utopian. Although I am here comparing and contrasting, this is not with the intention of praising the `theoretical' statement over the `ideological' one. Both combine rational-analytical and utopian-prophetic elements - a combination surely essential to any emancipatory social doctrine. Whilst Marx and Marxism have an ambiguous attitude towards utopianism, contemporary libertarian socialist, feminist and ecological movements have refamiliarised socialists with the necessity of an appeal to emotion, desire, and imagination in challenging the myriad inhumanities, indignities and banalities to which we are accustomed. 

I find these documents amazing and moving, dated in significant ways, yet nonetheless capable of throwing light 150 years forward and therefore worthy of the critical attention of not simply contemporary socialists but all democratically-minded people. Before consigning this doctrine to some garbage bin of early-industrial history, or of totalitarian discourse, we should consider the possible connection between Marxist labour and socialist internationalism and that of the new alternative social movements of our present day. I will interrogate the texts both for their main themes and their contemporary resonances and lacunae. And I hope to do so with the kind of critical eye and creative spirit they themselves so vividly display. 
 
 

Communism as international social movement

The relevant passage from the GI is brief enough to be cited in full: 

This `alienation' (to use a term which will be comprehensible to the philosophers) can, of course, only be abolished given two practical premises. For it to become an `intolerable’ power, i.e. a power against which men make a revolution, it must necessarily have rendered the great mass of humanity `propertyless', and produced, at the same time, the contradiction of an existing world of wealth and culture, both of which conditions presuppose a great increase in productive power, a high degree of its development. And, on the other hand, this development of productive forces (which itself implies the actual empirical existence of men in their world-historical, instead of local, being) is an absolutely necessary practical premise because without it want is merely made general, and with destitution the struggle for necessities and all the old filthy business would necessarily be reproduced; and furthermore, because with this universal development of productive forces is a universal intercourse between men established, which produces in all nations simultaneously the phenomenon of the `propertyless' mass (universal competition), makes each nation dependent on the revolutions of the others, and finally has put world-historical, empirically universal individuals in place of local ones. Without this, 1) communism could only exist as a local event: 2) the forces of intercourse themselves could not have developed as universal, hence intolerable powers: they would have remained home-bred conditions surrounded by superstition; and 3) each extension of intercourse would abolish local communism. Empirically, communism is only possible as the act of the dominant peoples `all at once' and simultaneously, which presupposes the universal development of productive forces and the world intercourse bound up with communism. Moreover, the mass of propertyless workers - the utterly precarious position of labour-power on a mass scale cut off from capital or from even a limited satisfaction and, therefore, no longer merely temporarily deprived of work itself as a secure source of life - presupposes the world market through competition. The proletariat can thus only exist world-historically, just as communism, its activity, can only have a `world-historical' existence. World-historical existence of individuals means, existence of individuals which is directly linked up with world history.

Communism is for us not a state of affairs which is to be established, an ideal to which reality [will] have to adjust itself. We call communism the real movement which abolishes the present state of things. The conditions of this movement result from the premises now in existence. (Arthur 1970:56-7. Original emphasis). 

The international nature of the conditions for overcoming alienation. The contradiction between the propertylessness of the `great mass of humanity' and an `existing world of wealth and culture' has been increasing since Marx' time. This has, however, been not only, and certainly not simply, in the form of a contradiction between capital and labour. We are witness to processes of mass proletarianisation (deprival of means of production) without creation of a majority proletariat, of situations in which it is a privileged minority of the proletarianised that becomes - or remains - a permanent proletariat. We see deepening contradictions between worlds of wealth and culture and those denied this - today both between and within `creditor' and `debtor' states, North and South, West and Rest. We are cognisant of a continuing or even increasing coincidence of propertylessness with female or minority (ethnic, religious) status. So this truly international contradiction has been accompanied not with a growing homogenisation of the propertyless but a continuing heterogenisation and one that is repeatedly restructured. 

For Marx, the development of these international contradictions required such an increase in productive power and wealth that their resolution would permit a surpassing of want, destitution and a struggle for necessities. The computer-based technical revolution now advancing in and beyond the industrialised capitalist world is capable of ensuring rising productivity and full employment with a decrease in labour time (in the core countries, from an average 1,600 to 1,000 hours per year in the next 15-20 years). Although this development opens up the potentiality for overcoming the `old filthy business' we know, of course, that it is currently being used to further fragment (industrially/occupationally), segment (by nationality, gender, ethnicity, religion) and stratify the propertyless. 

For Marx, it was the above process that would ensure two crucial conditions, the `empirical existence of men in their world-historical, instead of local being' and the making of `each nation dependent upon the revolutions of the others'. On the one hand, the absence of the earlier-mentioned requirements (a homogeneous impoverished mass) explains why the latter conditions (world-historical existence, interdependent national revolutions) have not yet come about. On the other hand, we can empirically identify the growth of these two processes: increasing numbers of movements addressing or seeking global community; the increasing interweaving of local social movements; the demonstration effect - from the Philippines to Prague - of `people’s power’ movements. 

The proletariat and communism as only existing internationally. That what we have long witnessed are increasingly national proletariats and increasingly national communisms is accepted by most Marxists. There is, however, the temptation to escape from this leaden empirical contingency to the nebulous freedom of theory or wish-fulfilment: the proletariat and communism do not yet fully exist because they have forgotten or never learned what Marx pronounced: next time they will. Since neither historical nor contemporary social analysis reveals much evidence for such an assertion, we are left dependent on faith in an existing doctrine and ultimate authority - something Marxists do not tolerate from non-Marxists. 

I propose a radical solution. This is motivated by what is said at the end of the quotation about `the real movement’. I suggest we have to take Marx' position on the proletariat as figurative rather than literal. It is clear why he attached his aspiration for the end of human alienation to the proletariat - the new, modern, mass, nationally-homeless class of the exploited and oppressed. I suggest we here take `proletariat' as a metaphor for all the alienated, all those denied their past rights, their present capacities, their future potential (this does not, of course, mean we should or could do this wherever Marx refers to the proletariat). For the increasing internationalism of those alienated in many different ways there is increasing evidence and argument. That the overcoming of alienation (`communism' in Marx' language) is inconceivable nationally, is surely demonstrated by the collapse of `socialism' not only in one country but also in one bloc. Increasing interdependence, moreover, seems to imply that you cannot today build, or preserve, even a capitalist welfare state in just one country. 

My radical revisionism, however, does not imply either writing off the proletariat as an autonomous contributor to internationalism, or abandoning appeals from outside or above (or below) that it consider the necessities, or advantages, or even the pleasures, of a global identity. It means only abandonment of any assumption that proletarian internationalism is structurally determined and/or politically exemplary. On this understanding, the proletariat would also have to go to school, and not so much with Marx (or me) as with the other alienated masses. It would also have to opt for the untrodden but exhilarating world of internationalism rather than the familiar, well-trodden but imprisoning parish of nation-statism. The proletariat may still have a world to win, but it also has more than its chains to lose. 

Communism as the real social movement. This formulation invites us to question its own formulator and its social forms. Communism has long been for the world primarily a `state of affairs' - an affair of Communist states and statist socialists. It has also always been largely an `ideal to which reality [will] have to adjust itself', increasingly an ideal in the heads only of socialist intellectuals (idealist socialist intellectuals?). If communism is meant in the first instance to be `the real movement which abolishes the present state of things', then this requires us to address ourselves to such real movements (movements in the sense both of societal transformation and mass feelings, ideas, organisation and action). The real movements that are presently transforming the international order are the new alternative social movements. These do not have to be understood as replacing, or in opposition to, the labour movement. Amongst the real movements could also be counted the `social movement unionism' or `new social unionism' that, explicitly or implicitly, to a greater or lesser extent, for a longer or shorter period, surpasses the `economism' and `politicism', or the reformist or insurrectionary workerism, of its predecessors or competitors. 

The necessity for simultaneous revolution by the dominant nations. This assertion reveals Marx' apocalypticism and eurocentrism. The latter was not so much surpassed as by-passed by Lenin's notion of the weak link, and by Trotsky's of uneven and combined development. What they understood, because Russia experienced it, is that the international spread of capitalist social relations is multi-faceted and uneven in essence. But this does not imply, as it did in part for Lenin, and increasingly for some of his followers, that we can shift revolutionary primacy from `advanced' to `backward' nations, or revolutionary agency from the anti-capitalist proletariat of the industrialised centre to the anti-imperialist masses of the rural periphery. It rather requires us to abandon any idea of countries or blocs or parties that are either industrial/cultural models or revolutionary vanguards. 

Recognising the differential implications and experience of capitalist internationalisation requires us to: 1) identify the similar structures, processes and experiences in different countries that lend themselves to common internationalist action: 2) recognise that differential position and experience within an increasingly capitalist world order implies different movement priorities, discoveries, inventions and achievements; and 3) work out principles and forms of solidarity amongst and between the different significant movements of particular countries or blocs (e.g. both peace movement with peace movement and labour movement with women's movement). 

Finally, we need to ask ourselves why Marx had an apocalyptical vision of emancipation. I suggest that apocalypticism is a requirement of a mass emancipatory ideology or movement in a situation in which masses of people are capable of rebelling against existing conditions but not of adequately conceiving or controlling a desired alternative. I further suggest that today masses of people are potentially capable of doing the latter, which is why apocalyptical visions and strategies are associated with early, undeveloped or (self-)isolated socialist movements (Sendero Luminoso in Peru, the Communist Party of the Philippines, both inspired by Maoism). Visions of sudden and complete transformation to a land of milk and honey, where `the people will rule' (as in the original African National Congress Charter), are declining in the major progressive social movements of the Third World, such as those of South Africa, Brazil, South Korea and Mexico. This does not, of course, mean that apocalyptical visions are absent amongst large parts of the masses locally. But contemporary mass political apocalypticism - Thank God! - appears increasingly confined to reactionary, militaristic and obscurantist forces (religious fundamentalists, chauvinist nationalists, racists, global militarists). 

The existence of the premises for communism. The reason why, almost 150 years later, these premises have not yet translated themselves into empirical international reality, or even mass internationalist aspiration, has been sufficiently argued above. 

What will happen in the absence of the necessary conditions. The value of this passage lies not only in its prescience but also in reminding us that such is the outcome of a new theoretical approach linked with new emancipatory struggles (compare contemporary feminist or ecological theory). Marx says that if the conditions are not ripe, capitalism and the market will continue to appear `home-bred conditions surrounded by superstition'. He also says that the further extension of the world market will `abolish local communism'. What we have, of course, witnessed over the last century and a half is working-class advances within capitalist states (by nationally self-defined workers, without or against others), and of anti-capitalist revolutions being repeatedly penetrated, de-radicalised and restricted by the dynamic growth of international capital. What we have so far witnessed internationally have, in other words, been working-class movements within, or national revolutions against, capitalism. Surpassing capitalism is, obviously, another matter. 

Communism as international political movement

Certainly the best-remembered part of the Communist Manifesto are the closing words, `Workers of all countries, unite!'. What it further has to say about internationalism was, of course, to determine the international appeal of the Manifesto as a whole. Unfortunately the relevant passages are scattered throughout the document and therefore difficult to present as briefly as the previous one (if this encourages readers to read it for themselves in 1998, so much the better). Within the Manifesto I identify three main elements, once again re-arranged for purposes of analysis and discussion. 

1. Bourgeois internationalisation as progressive. Whilst it is evident that Marx and Engels by no means identify themselves with the bourgeoisie, they clearly consider its international role as progressive, as modernising, developing, homogenising and unifying the world. The violent `pain of extinction' with which the bourgeoisie threatens `barbarian and semi-barbarian' nations is presented as civilising. The bourgeoisie is even credited with undermining `national one-sidedness and narrow-mindedness' (amongst exiled social revolutionaries?) and of creating a `world literature' (accessible to multilingual cosmopolitan intellectuals?). It is hardly necessary, in the face of the last century and a half, to criticise this picture. Nor is it necessary to argue the linkage between the attitudes here expressed and those of European bourgeois evolutionism, modernism, cosmopolitanism or even racism. What is necessary is to stress what is missing, since this helps us to understand why internationalisation has not led to internationalism; why industrialism is not merely disruptive but destructive; why the core bourgeoisie is imperialist and the peripheral one chauvinist; why capitalist statism is militaristic, why world capitalist civilisation reproduces division and individualisation. 

Far from creating its own international and internationalist gravedigger in the industrial proletariat, for example, capitalism appears to have divided the gravedigging process technically, socially and geographically, assigning different parts of the task to the differentially proletarianised, of different gender, ethnic or religious categories, under diverse political and labour regimes. In addition to a `world literature’ (unknown in 1848 to even the reading middle-class public in England), it has created a commercialised and industrialised transnational culture which attempts to homogenise audiences as consumers, spread dehumanised bourgeois values, exploit or erode local popular cultures containing elements of resistance or opposition and, finally, to obstruct any such communication between these as would be necessary for the creation of any kind of global solidarity culture. 

To add all the above is to qualify, not reverse, the evaluation. For it is, for example, equally evident that, as the Manifesto argues, the development of railways and other technical channels of communication were determinant in the rapid organisation of labour nationally and internationally. An interesting question follows. If the railways thus allowed labour organisation, did they not, perhaps, also restrict its shape? Railways are spatially-fixed, monopolistically- or state-owned, hierarchically managed, centripetal channels. Their international connections mechanically connect the separate nationally-owned or controlled systems. Did not national and international labour movements unconsciously reproduce the pattern, structure and management of such channels? Another question. Did not the fact that this means of communication was a technical instrument for the transportation of unspecified goods lead to 1) successive waves of socialist optimism and pessimism as successive means of communication appeared open to, or filled with, capitalist or socialist messages? 2) a tendency to see communication as instrumental to political goods already produced and ready for distribution? 3) a failure to recognise communication as culture - as a human creative activity, with its own specificity, and with its own weight, over and against political economy, in the struggle for international emancipation? 

Capitalist industrialisation and internationalisation is, in any case, a highly contradictory phenomenon, simultaneously denying, provoking and even stimulating possibilities for self-organisation and liberation. The effective use of computers in both individualistic sabotage of the computer society, or in collective struggle against it, would be one example. Another would be the radical recycling of the white, North American individualist Superman myth by the apparition in Mexico of Superbarrio, the protector of urban squatters, who - tongue firmly in cheek - states that he draws his power only from the collective. Superbarrio (significantly for our subject), operates amongst Latinos/as in both Mexico and the US, declaring `We didn't make the border, we don't want the border' . More recently, faced with the pain of extinction, Superbarrio’s barbarian or semi-barbarian, rural and tribal, cousins in Chiapas have brought together democratic Mexico - and democratic movements worldwide - by combining `tradition’, `modernity’ and `postmodern’ computer communication - as if these distinctions/oppositions were ideological obstructions to human emancipation (which, of course, they are). 

2. The proletariat as a liberated, liberating and internationalist subject. The proletariat is endowed by the CM with positive and universalistic qualities. It is free of `every trace of national character' and `bourgeois prejudices’. The workers `have no country', they `have nothing to lose but their chains'. They have to complete the task begun by the bourgeoisie. By ending class antagonisms within countries they will end them between countries. And they must end them first within nations, become the leading class within the nation, become the nation. Although these phrases come from different parts of the Manifesto, they nonetheless amount to a clear argument: since the proletariat is free of bourgeois and nationalist prejudices, since it is free of any stake in existing society, it can therefore put an end to conflicts between nations, this requiring that it first take over the nation-state from the old ruling classes that are responsible for international conflicts. 

In considering this view, it is necessary to make a number of points. 

Firstly, the positive, progressive and promethean characteristics the working class is here accorded have little or no correspondence with the early-19th century British proletariat as described by Engels four years earlier. In later political dealings with, and writings on, the British working class, its leaders and organisations, Marx and Engels identified national and stratum privilege, narrow self-interest, subordination to bourgeois ideas and institutions, and chauvinism. They employed, for example, the untheorised concepts of the `lumpen proletariat’, the`semi-proletarianised peasantry’ and the `labour aristocracy’, to explain away the failure of the proletariat to behave according to the specifications of the CM. 

Secondly, the argument is class-reductionist in implying that state and nation are forms of existence, or expressions, of classes, or of secondary import to classes, in determining social liberation. It would seem superfluous today to have to argue for the continuing, often growing, weight of state and nationality/ethnicity in determining relations between people and peoples. The commonly tense and sometimes violent relations between and within even culturally close Communist states - and the longstanding state discrimination against ethnic or religious minorities within them - was evidently due to these forces. `Ethno-Communist' was an accurate and prescient characterisation of one of these regimes. As the Communism disappeared, ethnicity is its main inheritor. 

Thirdly, the argument is evolutionist in suggesting that the proletariat has to complete a task begun by the bourgeoisie rather than to criticise and transform all bourgeois relations and processes. 

Fourthly, the argument is stageist in so far as it suggests that national struggle somehow proceeds the international one, or that international conflicts cannot be ended without proletarian rule nationally. This implies a priority of struggles, or an order of separate levels, at odds with the GI - and with a dialectical understanding of inter-penetrating and mutually-determining national and international spheres. 

Fifthly, the argument is, of course, sexist. At a time when a large part of factory labour was carried out by women and children, the proletariat is assumed to consist of adult males - who presumably neither beat, rape, nor more-subtly oppress, their family members. I am confident that, for readers of this piece, 150 years after the CM, I do not have to spell out the mutually reinforcing relationship between patriarchy, nationalism, racism, the exploitation of nature, hierarchy, competitive individualism and militarism. 

Given, in sum, the complex nature of both the 19th and 20th-century proletariat, given the complexity of social structures within which it existed and exists, the portrayal of the proletariat as a liberated, liberating and vanguard internationalist subject is precisely an `ideal to which reality [will] have to adjust itself'. Marx’s revolutionary internationalist proletariat was, evidently, a philosophical requirement rather than a sociological discovery (thus providing a further justification for my radical alternative to this single emancipatory subject above). 

3. The communist role: The only thing that distinguishes communists from other working-class parties is that within national struggles they press the common interests of the proletariat internationally, and that at any stage they press the interests of the movement generally. The conclusion to the last section applies here with equal force. The aspiration represented by the Marx-Engels assertion has evidently been disappointed by the nationalisation and statification of socialists and socialism. Once again, however, we have to abandon dependence on a Second Coming, a Last Really International. We cannot today see, even in such internationalist traditions as those of the Trotskyists, Worker Autonomists or Anarcho-Syndicalists, the embryo of a body which is not only internationalist but also possessed of the other characteristics required by the CM: that it be not opposed to other working-class parties, that it be not separate from the proletariat, that it have no sectarian principles. 

In their concept of the role of communists, Marx and Engels combined traditional religious notions of salvation (an Elect, possessing the Word, leading the Chosen People, via an Apocalypse, to a Promised Land), with the quintessentially bourgeois form of mass political organisation, the party! The power - or limitations - of this highly specific combination of forms (in relation to their ideal of a global movement to end human alienation) is witnessed by the way socialist parties have not so much failed to embody or further the project but have actually negated it. The two utopias socialist parties can still offer us today are represented, I suppose, on the one hand by a Pan-European `social market' society, and, on the other, the `society of great harmony' which the terroristic Sendero Luminoso (Shining Path) tried to `drive home’ into the minds of Peru's miserable but resilient masses. But these were or are either national or bloc projects. The Sendero type was one so inhuman, and implied such isolation from the world (also of local markets), that it has been abandoned by leaders or rejected by followers almost everywhere. And the social-market society, whilst still exercising attraction for those people in the East and the South not fascinated by California’s concrete utopia, is one that cannot be reproduced internationally without despoiling the planet itself. 

It is curious that the CM, the more political and strategic of the two documents, should seem more dated or less relevant than the earlier, more abstract and philosophical one. This once again suggests that we have to liberate the project of internationalism from the politics of a 19th-century world dominated by the market, industrialisation, worker-capitalist conflict, nation- and empire-building, deification of the masculine and struggle for the control of the machinery of the state. 

Conclusion: from an internationalism of the imagination to the imagination of an internationalism

We may end by considering the response, some years ago, of two British Marxist labour historians to the decline and fall of classical internationalism. Both observed that the people’s flag was deeply tattered, but they seem to have had rather different attitudes towards the tatters. 

The first historian is Eric Hobsbawm, who remained a communist even as Communism was being rejected by massive labour and democratic movements wherever it still had power or influence. Although Hobsbawm evidently has many brilliant and suggestive insights into the nature of classical internationalism, he has no real explanation for its decline, except in terms of the rise of nationalism and the decline of internationalist parties (Hobsbawm 1988:14-15). This is a tautological position, and one that begs many questions about these parties and their doctrines. He shows little or no awareness of the new internationalisms as a growing phenomenon of the 1980s, and offers even less perspective for the future. What he had to say about contemporary internationalism in 1988 was that it had been undermined by racism nationally and that it was difficult for nationally-organised trade unions to fight internationally-organised multinationals (8). This was again a question-begging statement, and one that showed no knowledge of what workers and unions had recently been doing to confront transnational corporations internationally. For the future, Hobsbawm could offer no perspective other than raising again the flag of internationalism `even today when the storms of history threaten to tear it to tatters' (12). The sole example he could offer for a reviving labour internationalism was the African National Congress in apartheid South Africa. The passage from which the above quotation is taken runs more fully as follows: 

 We will leave aside the question of how much the ANC, in post-apartheid South Africa, deserves our internationalist admiration, or of what internationalist admiration it presently evinces. What is significant is that Hobsbawm rests his small faint hope for the future of labour internationalism on the ANC, which was, of course, a nationalist movement, aimed (like past Communist ones) at the capture of state power. It is equally significant that Hobsbawm considered neither the problematic internationalism of the (then) pro-Soviet ANC nor the rich and complex history of international solidarity relations between workers and unions inside and outside South Africa at the time he was writing! One therefore remains with historical storms, tattered flags and small faint hopes in Third World state-nationalist movements... 

The `banner' of socialist internationalism has become tattered indeed in the last decades, and on every side. It has not been one to carry proudly aloft. At the most one has carried a few sheets of paper, and often one has been reduced to muttering to oneself. The commitment has been to an `International' of the imagination, which has had only fleeting embodiment in real movements, detached unequivocally from both Stalinism and from complicity with the reasons of capitalist power. To maintain that commitment has been to be an `alien' not only within this country but within great sections of the purported socialist and Marxist movement itself. (Thompson 1978:iv) 

At the time Marx and Engels were writing, the concentrated, massified proletariat of mine, mill and rail was just being born. Today it is being dwarfed by dispersed and differentiated labour in the service sector - waged or unwaged. By the year 2,000 the largest single industry (industry?) will be tourism. It is therefore time for us to say RIP to the Revolutionary Internationalist Proletarian of 1848. He was a figment of fevered socialist imagination, and today rather deserves critical socialist analysis. In so far, however, as we share Thompson’s experience, in the new global social movements and culture of 1998, it should be possible for us to address, with both scepticism and hope, the internationalism of actually-existing wage-earners - and their semi- or unwaged sisters and brothers. Including that of airline stewards, waiters and clerical staff. They do, after all, work in a globalised industry. They are often computer-literate. They sometimes know two or more languages. They are familiar with distant cultures. 

It is, therefore, today both possible and necessary to move from an old international of the imagination to the imagination of a new internationalism. In so far as this now addresses global rather than inter-national problems, I propose to re-imagine it as the New Global Solidarity movement. 
 
 

Bibliography 

 Arthur, C.H. (ed). 1970. Karl Marx and Frederick Engels: The German Ideology London: Lawrence and Wishart.