Understanding socialist and proletarian internationalism: the impossible past and possible future of emancipation on a world scale

The old heroic socialist and proletarian internationalism is dead, having been recently replaced by the pluralistic and multi-faceted internationalism of the new social movements. Attempts by leftist writers to come to terms with this process have proven unsat- isfactory. Examination of the history of socialist and proletarian internationalism shows it to have been a more complex and richer phenomenon than socialist myth or contemporary analysis suggests. It also reveals that its decline was due to neither prematurity, mistakes or betrayals, but to the nature of the working class itself. There is, nonetheless, much to be learned from both the strengths and shortcomings of traditional proletarian and socialist internationalism. Classical internationalist theory, of Marx and Engels, was also responsible for the failure, saddling an ill-equipped working class with the central role in international emancipation. What they, however, both predicted and implied about the overcoming of alienation on a world scale, also speaks relevantly to both the new social movements and to the labour and socialist one. A new labour internationalism is already developing, implicitly learning from, and relating to, the internationalism of the new social movements. Socialists have not, in general, been able to come to terms with the new realities and the meaning of a specific socialist contribution to a new internationalism has yet to be spelled out.