The recent spate of the far right hanging or painting national flags throughout England has brought condemnation from everyone except other reactionaries.
Everyone recognises the nationalist and racist intent of these actions but the response from the liberal centre and some socialists has been rather odd. Despite recognising the flags as nationalist, racist symbols, they’ve tried to argue that this is merely a case of the far right doing patriotism wrong, not that patriotism is a problem in and of itself.
I would argue in the Marxist tradition, that patriotism is a reactionary tendency that we need to avoid.
As socialists we recognise the following: 1) capitalism is a global system that must be defeated on a global scale; and 2) that the state in a capitalist country is an organ of class rule for the capitalist class.
Obviously then, when a socialist says that they’re patriotic, they don’t mean that they love or feel loyalty towards the capitalist state of “their” nation. They only mean that they love the workers and culture, and want the best for everyone who lives there.
But do you love the workers of your country more than you love the workers of France, Ghana, or Vietnam? If so, when push comes to shove you’ll choose to put the workers of “your own” country first. That’s the route to chauvinism and a lack of solidarity. It was this kind of thinking that led the communist parties of Europe, except for the Bolsheviks, to side with “their” own capitalist states during World War 1, because they thought they were defending the interests of “their” workers.
The Bolsheviks, in the Russian Empire, on the other hand, embraced an attitude of revolutionary defeatism; that is, instead of working with their own government to win the war, or to win peace without losing any land to annexation, as some desired, they worked to defeat their own government and weaken it, so it could be conquered by the working masses. Their anti war agitation set the scene for the February Revolution with its calls for Peace, Land, and Bread, and gave them credibility as a force that held the true interests of the people at heart.
It’s true that we organise on a national scale because the world is already divided into nation states, but we can’t be the champions of this or that part of the proletariat at the expense of others. That way leads to us siding with our class enemies against the working and marginalised masses in other countries, and strengthening our enemies at home. After all, many imperialist actions can benefit the workers of “our own” nation in the short term while benefiting and strengthening its capitalist class.
Capitalism is a global system of class oppression and we have to work with the class conscious proletarian and peasant peoples around the world to finally defeat it. Our job is to defeat the capitalists where we live and to support the workers elsewhere to do the same. Viewed like that, our duty is clearly not to put the workers in one place above the workers who live elsewhere, but to strive alongside the class conscious workers everywhere for our common good.
It’s a fine thing to love the proletariat, to feel an affinity with the working masses everywhere, as we face our common enemy. But when you start loving the proletariat of one country above another, you’re setting yourself up to betray the communist movement and side with capitalists.
