This thread raises some interesting questions and offers some good answers. But there is a lot of confusion and it is not clear that people are arguing about the same thing.
The Problem
There is clearly no consensus definition of the following words:
patriotism
nationalism
PatSoc
patriotic socialism
The clearest definitions for these words have come from those comments defending patriotism as Marxist.
I do not think we are arguing over nationalism as that question was answered a long time ago by e.g. Stalin and Lenin. Okay, their work may need updating, but updating means building on their legacy, which nobody is really trying to do here. The main references to nationalism are trying to:
a. Argue that Marxists have an agreed notion of nationalism, which can be good in the periphery, and that this is what patriotism means (because e.g. in ex-colonies, it means liberation, etc); or
b. Argue that Marxists have an agreed notion of nationalism, which may be bad in the imperial core, and that this is what patriotism means (e.g. because there it means homophobia, transphobia, patriarchy, etc).
So the question is not:
i. What do Marxists think of nationalism?
The question is:
ii. Are patriotism, patriotic socialists, and PatSocs the same as nationalism and nationalists?
And
iii. To what extent do these terms relate to sexuality, gender, race, colonialism, etc?
Only by answering (ii) can we reach common ground and engage with the same idea. We may then disagree about each others’ conclusions, but at least those conclusions will refer to the same idea.
Therefore it seems necessary to identify agreed definitions for these words. For example: Is PatSoc only relevant to the internet? If so, who gets to claim the label? People who identify by it? Or people who use it to classify their enemies?
Regardless, there is a more important question to answer first:
iv. What is the class character of patriotism, PatSoc, patriotic socialism, and nationalism?
These words will have an abstract class character and a class character that is unique to each country. If we take an intersectional view of class and avoid class reductionism, we may partially answer (iii) at the same time.
Marx and Engels wrote of the class character of socialism in the Communist Manifesto. We must do the same for our subject.
What is the class character of US patriotism?
Zac Cope argues in The Wealth of (Some) Nations that the majority of workers in the global north are labour aristocrats – paid well enough to look the other way on the imperial question, whether petite bourgeois or ‘proletariat’. There’s a lot to say about whether this is true or whether it was true but is now changing.
J Sakai argues in Settlers that the ‘white proletariat’ in the Settler Colony is a myth. Again, we could argue over whether a white proletariat’ has since grown.
Michael Parenti, at least, argues the ruling class has long sought the ‘third worldisation’ of the global north. This statement accepts classes are fluid.
It is difficult to classify the US as mainly this it mainly that. It’s class composition is constantly changing. It also comprises many states with reasonably independent legislatures and different demographics.
The important point for our discussion is that any presentation of the US as mainly labour aristocratic or petite bourgeois seems to accept the vision of the US that is shown in the entertainment and news media – created by the US ruling class.
That is, white, middle class (whatever that means), reasonably well-off, suburbian, liberal, content with the idea of a homogenous US if not with the way that it is governed under the Republicans or Democrats, and the world’s defender of democracy. This vision also includes a one sided view of patriotism, which involves a stripey flag, militarism, and pledges of allegiance.
Is this what the US is? It certainly seems so when the US is viewed through the prism of entertainment and news media. It almost certainly seems so to the millions of people who have been in the receiving end of US ‘democracy’. It probably seems so to many in America, who are subjected to the same images as the rest of the world, but from another angle.
Is this what the US is from the inside? Maybe not.
(Apologies in advance for defining people as ‘not white’. I do not think it will come off as any less racist by trying to list and differentiate all the people who are not included in the ruling class white supremacist vision.)
“The most prevalent racial or ethnic group for the United States was the White alone non-Hispanic population at 57.8%. This decreased from 63.7% in 2010.”
“The Hispanic or Latino population was the second-largest racial or ethnic group, comprising 18.7% of the total population.”
“The Black or African American alone non-Hispanic population was the third-largest group at 12.1%.”
This data is problematic because in trying to recognise ‘diversity’ it presupposes racial difference along biological lines. Still, the data indicates the US is not white.
Nor has the US ever been white.
It’s ruling class and white petite bourgeois segments think it is white. They are delusioned by white supremacism, and could not and cannot see the toil and suffering of indigenous Americans or slaves as part of the US.
To the ruling white supremacists, those workers are always somehow separate to ‘the US’. Unfortunately, this is a pervasive idea. To paraphrase Marx and Engels in The German Ideology, the ruling ideas of any epoch are the ideas of the ruling class.
The above census data, showing a ‘decline’ in the white population, gives the impression that whites were once the majority. False.
At the beginning, the indigenous Americans were the majority. Afterwards, Africans and indigenous Americans were the majority, perhaps depending on where one draws state / city lines on old maps. At some point, the proportions turned.
What is the US?
Any revolutionary worth the name must be unified with all ‘minorities’, whether defined by class, race, gender, sexuality, etc. Together these people comprise the majority. The US is these people.
The US is not the cis-het white, males of the ruling class, whether depicted as a banker in a suit, a Proud Boy, a lone adventurer protected in a wagon circle, or a struggling, salt of the earth, and slightly racist rural lumpen.
Thus we have:
The US defined by the people who live in it, who built it, who feed each other, and care for each other; and
The US defined by its ruling class.
And there we may have the solution. Patriotism of (1) may be revolutionary. Patriotism of (2) is almost certainly reactionary. I don’t think anyone in this thread would disagree. Reply if you do; I’d like to know what I missed.
If this is correct, it is up to patriotic revolutionaries to decide on appropriate patriotic symbolism. This may mean abandoning the current flag or keeping it.
I imagine that any Marxist would hope the Stars and Stripes eventually go the same way as the Confederate flag. In the meantime, due to the prevalence of the ruling class notion of patriotism, there are likely many people who could be radicalised, but who also respect the flag. It seems a bit self-defeating to exclude these people from the revolution.
Remember, the majority is not cis-het, white, male, and middle class, but to my understanding, all have to praise the flag as children every school day, and must somewhat accept this white supremacist vision of the US. These ‘patriots’ might not lead the revolution, but if the flag brings them along?
Finally: PatSocs
Are PatSocs revolutionary Marxists? It’s beside the point, really, because the label is contested. People identify by it and others use it as a derogatory category. They could be, but they may not be. We would need a class analysis of any given person to decide. And we would first have to ensure that calling a person a PatSoc is not a category error.
[Our two options are] The US defined by the people who live in it, who built it, who feed each other, and care for each other; [or] the US defined by its ruling class.
You are creating a false dichotomy rooted in an individualistic understanding of what a nation is. A nation is NOT merely a collection of the individuals in it. A nation is a system, it’s a power structure. We cannot analyze what the US is by looking solely at the people inside it. We must see it as a historically situated society. And as a historically situated society, America is a settler colony.
Any revolutionary worth the name must be unified with all ‘minorities’, whether defined by class, race, gender, sexuality, etc. Together these people comprise the majority. The US is these people.
Tuck and Yang in their piece “Decolonization is not a Metaphor” help us to understand how settler systems absorb “minorities” and integrate them into the colonial project. They explicitly analyze people who are kidnapped from Africa and enslaved in the US, as well their descendants, and show how these people, while certainly not white European bourgeois are never the less engaged in the colonial project because they have to be. Settlerism creates a system of pressures that, once an individual becomes a participant in that system, drive that individual’s interests. Settlers, therefore, represent an entire historical body politic that, regardless of minority status, have systemic interests that are in opposition to the national sovereignty of the indigenous people whose oppression is renewed every single moment the settler colony continues to exist.
A revolutionary socialist state must, of necessity, repress any factions that are opposed to the existence of that state. Therefore, a revolutionary socialist state driven by patriotism for a settler nation, must of necessity repress indigenous movements for national self-direction. This is a clear contradiction and I cannot state this emphatically enough:
THIS IS A CLEAR CONTRADICTION IN THE FORMULATION OF PATRIOTIC SOCIALISM IN AND OF SETTLER COLONIES
If we do not address this contradiction, it is clear that Patriotic Socialism in settler colonies are building a system with an internal contradiction that requires it to maintain the violent oppression of indigenous peoples. It is clear that Patriotic Socialism in settler colonies legitimize the settler colonial form of imperialism as a basis for national self-direction.
The implications of this are that a PatSoc revolutionary state in a settler colony will have the following potential outcomes:
the complete eradication of indigenous peoples
a failure of the state to counter-revolutionaries leveraging the contradiction of oppressed indigenous peoples
a peaceful coexistence with oppressed indigenous peoples
The problem with number 3 is that there is so far no analysis that shows this is possible. Settler colonists have no recognized legitimate claim to national sovereignty. The power of settler colonists to engage in collaboration with indigenous peoples is based entirely on their power to oppress those indigenous peoples, the historical extermination of those peoples and their material society, and a centuries long unbroken chain of systemic oppression.
All analyses of this question have determined that the only non-contradictory path forward is full inversion of the power dynamic - national self-direction must be stripped from settler colonists, including ADOS, “minorities”, and other “non-white Europeans” and handed over entirely to indigenous peoples.
The PatSoc movements within settler colonies simply chooses to ignore this contradiction by assuming they can resolve it after they have power, that the most important thing is to get critical mass of the largest group of people (the settler working class) and establish the revolutionary state. Given the above 2 outcomes, this is clearly factually incorrect and the decision to ignore the contradiction is idealism.
There’s at least one more major error in your analysis.
The important point for our discussion is that any presentation of the US as mainly labour aristocratic or petite bourgeois seems to accept the vision of the US that is shown in the entertainment and news media – created by the US ruling class.
This is an absolute non-sequitur. It is not the case that the entertainment and news media is the cause of the analysis that leads to the understanding of the US as mainly labor aristocrats. You are incorrect that labor aristocracy is equivalent with the upper middle class PMC. Literally every worker in the US, Canada, Scandinavia, and the EU can be described as labor aristocracy. The reason for this is that every single person in these countries, regardless of class, benefits immensely from US hegemony, imperialism, and power projection.
Infrastructure, medicine, fuel, rare earth metals, pollution displacement (from minor to life threatening), plastics, cheap commodities, hot water… literally every aspect of everyday life, from public transportation to private car service, from McDonald’s meals to Michelin Star restaurants, from plastic food wrap to hypodermic needles to Funko Pops to cell phones… ALL of it, including their quantity, variety, availability, cost, utility, and relations between and among it all, ALL of it is predicated on global hegemony through power projection, currently channeled through the European settler colonial nation of the USA, a hegemony that was historically developed by European imperial powers like France, Spain, England, Portugal, and The Netherlands.
The analysis is not based on propaganda. The analysis is based on interests. And the interests of the labor aristocracy are in opposition to the interests of the proletariat of the Global South. When the US loses its hegemony over the world, the price of fuel will increase for Americans almost immediately. Literally every single person the US, regardless of class, will find that this is against their own material interests. And there’s nothing that can be done about it in less than 30 years, because every single residential community is built for cars and every single home is under-insulated and not constructed for passive temperature management. Converting everything to electric will take decades, and even then, doing so still requires access to cheap rare earth materials. When American global hegemony ends, the price of rare earth materials will immediately increase.
There is no escape from this analysis. ALL Americans, Canadians, and Europeans will suffer from the end of US hegemony. Every single one from top to bottom. And this is why the working class in America has been deemed to be Labor Aristocracy. Not because of sitcoms and TV dramas, but because of the material analysis of their interests and how those interests materially incentivize their collective action against the interests of the global proletariat.
Given this analysis, a Patriotic Socialist movement in the US runs the very real risk of becoming a National Socialist movement:
It ignores the contradiction of oppression of indigenous peoples
It ignores the contradiction of the integration of oppressed peoples into the settler project
It ignores the contradiction between the interests of the labor aristocracy and the global proletariat
And given these three contradictions, the clear risk is that of the formation of a reactionary state, driven by the interests of the labor aristocracy, with local and global oppression rationalized by patriotism, armed with history’s largest military distributed in over 800 locations around the globe, with the entirety of Europe and NATO sharing in the interests of the Labor Aristocracy to maintain coercive hegemony.
Thanks for taking the time to write this. I appreciate that you have responded to my question. I don’t disagree with your conclusion, although you seem to have phrased this as if we are not on the same side, which is unfortunate.
Given the threats of bans and purges, there is not much room left to discuss and criticise. I feel that I can safely add and must add, before I am accused of being a ‘PatSoc’:
Any movement that tries to erase Indigenous Americans or other colonised peoples in any sense must be resisted;
On the one hand you assert the right of Indigenous Americans to sovereignty, and on the other hand you reject any form of patriotism within the US. Is this not a contradiction?
There remains no agreed definition of ‘PatSoc’;
I am not from the US;
I was not trying to define ‘nation’;
I was trying to synthesise the discussion in this thread to make sense of the arguments;
There seems to be a real problem of US-centrism in the criticisms of patriotism – again, centred on the view of the US presented in the media as an homogenous bloc, which seems to deny that Indigenous Americans live within the US jurisdiction;
I did not say that class is determined by media representation;
I did not say that labour aristocracy = upper middle class;
It seems impossible for people outside the US to comment on some issues without being pulled into a US-centric framework and criticised (impliedly or explicitly) for falling into one side or the other of a framework they are not necessarily part of; and
Without agreed definitions most of us are still talking past one another.
On the one hand you assert the right of Indigenous Americans to sovereignty, and on the other hand you reject any form of patriotism within the US. Is this not a contradiction?
This is not a contradiction. America is derived from the name of an Italian explorer. The concept of indigenous peoples exists only in contrast to settler. For indigenous people to have sovereignty is not patriotism. There is no civic or cultural nationalism involved here. It is about power, not about ideology. Patriotism is an ideology, that is, it is a set of beliefs instantiated in the minds of a group of people such these beliefs guide their behavior. That is not what decolonization requires, decolonization only requires transference of power.
There remains no agreed definition of ‘PatSoc’
The definition I’m working with - socialism that uses cultural and civic nationalism as an aesthetic and as a framework for prioritizing and deprioritizing aspects of intersectionality.
There seems to be a real problem of US-centrism in the criticisms of patriotism
There’s a lot of reasons for this, but it’s not a problem of analysis but of the mechanics discourse. Patriotic Socialism is a problem everywhere. In settler colonies, especially USA, Canada, Australia, but also inclusive of ALL states that exist on “The Americas”, the problem of Patriotic Socialism runs into the problem of colonization. But the problem of Patriotic Socialism in non-colonial states shows up constantly because it deprioritizes intersectionality to the point of dismissing it as bourgeois ideology. When those types of claims are made, it’s a very clear step in the progression to violent repression of minorities. PatSocs the world over make the argument that we must not demand tolerance, but rather build a big tent and bring into the movement people who would vote in favor of violently oppressing marginalized communities. If it was just aesthetics, no one would have a problem with PatSocs. It’s not just aesthetics. It’s tactics. PatSocs consistently prioritize populist tactics that threaten the safety of marginalized communities because they put forth a theory of action that says larger numbers are more important than ending oppression of marginalized groups.
It’s not just US-centric crticisms, PatSocs are simply arguing that anti-patsoc arguments don’t apply to them if they don’t exist in a settler-colonial state. You can tell they’re disingenuous because they then turn around and argue in another debate that Israeli settlers in Palestine aren’t a problem because the settler colony will eventually dissolve from its own contradictions so in the meantime it’s fine for Palestinians to get mass murdered in the worlds largest open-air prison.
I did not say that labour aristocracy = upper middle class;
You said:
The important point for our discussion is that any presentation of the US as mainly labour aristocratic or petite bourgeois seems to accept the vision of the US that is shown in the entertainment and news media – created by the US ruling class.
I don’t think this is important for our discussion at all, because I think its factually incorrect and pure speculative tripe. Any presentation of the US as mainly labor aristocratic does not, in fact, accept the vision of entertainment and news media. If you think you’re arguing in good faith by latching on to my use of the words “upper middle class”, and then using that framing to completely erase how baseless your original claim here was, you need to re-examine how you engage in discourse.
It seems impossible for people outside the US to comment on some issues without being pulled into a US-centric framework and criticised
Decolonization is a euro-centric framework because Europeans did the colonization. Criticisms of European nationalism have deep roots that are connected to US nationalism because the US is a European colony. To say that Patriotic Socialism in Europe is somehow different that Patriotic Socialism in the US because the US is a settler colony is to ignore that fact that it is European patriotism that created and sustained the US. The critiques of US Patriotic Socialism traverse the ocean and come home to European socialists because the contradictions in Patriotic Socialism exist regardless of what continent you’re on. The demand of European PatSocs to never have to contend with the contradictions of Patriotic Socialism if the critique mentions settlerism is merely deflection and a claim to innocence to protect themselves from the very real criticism that Patriotic Socialism is 100% of the time used, in practice, to rationalize exclusion of existing marginalized communities.
Without agreed definitions most of us are still talking past one another.
It’s not merely definitions, it’s analysis. The people who feel like they are disagreeing on the definition of patriotic socialism are either people who have not engaged rigorously with the theory and historical and contemporary practice of Patriotic Socialism, or they are deliberately trying to obfuscate the analysis with a No True Scotsman fallacy.
In another thread I literally just got done quote-mining on the topic of racism inherent to patriotism itself, esp in the West, and how racist or labor aristocratic splits gave 20th century socialist movements the crumbles.
I don’t think anyone in this thread would disagree.
Unfortunately, there are many that do. You basically say the same thing as me, that patriotism has class characteristics, and i already gathered a lot of denials of this in Lemmy, and at least 2 bans at reddit and a ban threat here. I don’t see this as a nonissue, since the “antipatriotism” accusation is and always was one of the major tactic of class enemies against us, and it was an effective one. While reversed in AES, served greatly to secure the people’s interests.
Again, i’m not even questioning the USA conditions, since i know it’s more complicated there, but the american exceptionalism being inevitably forced on everyone in such american-dominated internet space like here or especially reddit. That’s why i propose to stop using the word “patsoc” entirely, especially those are apparently just some youtube circlejerk, and start using the good old description of “socialchauvinists” since it’s cleare it what they apparently are (also, few threads later, still nobody could even narrow who are “they”, such nebulous group make it hard to even see entire issue as anything but a hot air)
Might I bring up that amongst the proles; you have those that see the stars and stripes the way most see the nazi flag. I unironically do. Usually when Im out in public, I get a sinister sense of danger when I see the American flag in certain contexts. Protests, rallies, vehicles with the flag flying on them such as pickup trucks, or in people’s yards with varying thin color line bullshit.
But you also have proles that sees the revolutionary potential that we were raised to believe in when seeing the stars and stripes. For many, the flag represents standing up to tyrants and bullies.
Then there is the question of what does it even mean to be patriotic as a revolutionary in America. What is patriotic in the American sense if you hope for and strive for a new society and country that is yet to exist?
Seems like a huge problem of aesthetics. But I honestly can not blame revolutionary folks in America for getting sekf defensive when presented with American trappings and being presented with an American historical narrative of revolution that has been a struggle AGAINST America itself. 🤷
This thread raises some interesting questions and offers some good answers. But there is a lot of confusion and it is not clear that people are arguing about the same thing.
The Problem
There is clearly no consensus definition of the following words:
I do not think we are arguing over nationalism as that question was answered a long time ago by e.g. Stalin and Lenin. Okay, their work may need updating, but updating means building on their legacy, which nobody is really trying to do here. The main references to nationalism are trying to:
So the question is not:
The question is:
And
Only by answering (ii) can we reach common ground and engage with the same idea. We may then disagree about each others’ conclusions, but at least those conclusions will refer to the same idea.
Therefore it seems necessary to identify agreed definitions for these words. For example: Is PatSoc only relevant to the internet? If so, who gets to claim the label? People who identify by it? Or people who use it to classify their enemies?
Regardless, there is a more important question to answer first:
These words will have an abstract class character and a class character that is unique to each country. If we take an intersectional view of class and avoid class reductionism, we may partially answer (iii) at the same time.
Marx and Engels wrote of the class character of socialism in the Communist Manifesto. We must do the same for our subject.
What is the class character of US patriotism?
Zac Cope argues in The Wealth of (Some) Nations that the majority of workers in the global north are labour aristocrats – paid well enough to look the other way on the imperial question, whether petite bourgeois or ‘proletariat’. There’s a lot to say about whether this is true or whether it was true but is now changing.
J Sakai argues in Settlers that the ‘white proletariat’ in the Settler Colony is a myth. Again, we could argue over whether a white proletariat’ has since grown.
Michael Parenti, at least, argues the ruling class has long sought the ‘third worldisation’ of the global north. This statement accepts classes are fluid.
It is difficult to classify the US as mainly this it mainly that. It’s class composition is constantly changing. It also comprises many states with reasonably independent legislatures and different demographics.
The important point for our discussion is that any presentation of the US as mainly labour aristocratic or petite bourgeois seems to accept the vision of the US that is shown in the entertainment and news media – created by the US ruling class.
That is, white, middle class (whatever that means), reasonably well-off, suburbian, liberal, content with the idea of a homogenous US if not with the way that it is governed under the Republicans or Democrats, and the world’s defender of democracy. This vision also includes a one sided view of patriotism, which involves a stripey flag, militarism, and pledges of allegiance.
Is this what the US is? It certainly seems so when the US is viewed through the prism of entertainment and news media. It almost certainly seems so to the millions of people who have been in the receiving end of US ‘democracy’. It probably seems so to many in America, who are subjected to the same images as the rest of the world, but from another angle.
Is this what the US is from the inside? Maybe not.
(Apologies in advance for defining people as ‘not white’. I do not think it will come off as any less racist by trying to list and differentiate all the people who are not included in the ruling class white supremacist vision.)
To cite some (problematic) 2020 data (https://www.census.gov/library/stories/2021/08/2020-united-states-population-more-racially-ethnically-diverse-than-2010.html):
This data is problematic because in trying to recognise ‘diversity’ it presupposes racial difference along biological lines. Still, the data indicates the US is not white.
Nor has the US ever been white.
It’s ruling class and white petite bourgeois segments think it is white. They are delusioned by white supremacism, and could not and cannot see the toil and suffering of indigenous Americans or slaves as part of the US.
To the ruling white supremacists, those workers are always somehow separate to ‘the US’. Unfortunately, this is a pervasive idea. To paraphrase Marx and Engels in The German Ideology, the ruling ideas of any epoch are the ideas of the ruling class.
The above census data, showing a ‘decline’ in the white population, gives the impression that whites were once the majority. False.
At the beginning, the indigenous Americans were the majority. Afterwards, Africans and indigenous Americans were the majority, perhaps depending on where one draws state / city lines on old maps. At some point, the proportions turned.
What is the US?
Any revolutionary worth the name must be unified with all ‘minorities’, whether defined by class, race, gender, sexuality, etc. Together these people comprise the majority. The US is these people.
The US is not the cis-het white, males of the ruling class, whether depicted as a banker in a suit, a Proud Boy, a lone adventurer protected in a wagon circle, or a struggling, salt of the earth, and slightly racist rural lumpen.
Thus we have:
And there we may have the solution. Patriotism of (1) may be revolutionary. Patriotism of (2) is almost certainly reactionary. I don’t think anyone in this thread would disagree. Reply if you do; I’d like to know what I missed.
If this is correct, it is up to patriotic revolutionaries to decide on appropriate patriotic symbolism. This may mean abandoning the current flag or keeping it.
I imagine that any Marxist would hope the Stars and Stripes eventually go the same way as the Confederate flag. In the meantime, due to the prevalence of the ruling class notion of patriotism, there are likely many people who could be radicalised, but who also respect the flag. It seems a bit self-defeating to exclude these people from the revolution.
Remember, the majority is not cis-het, white, male, and middle class, but to my understanding, all have to praise the flag as children every school day, and must somewhat accept this white supremacist vision of the US. These ‘patriots’ might not lead the revolution, but if the flag brings them along?
Finally: PatSocs
Are PatSocs revolutionary Marxists? It’s beside the point, really, because the label is contested. People identify by it and others use it as a derogatory category. They could be, but they may not be. We would need a class analysis of any given person to decide. And we would first have to ensure that calling a person a PatSoc is not a category error.
Edit: formatting. Edit 2: formatting headings
This is where your analysis fails.
You are creating a false dichotomy rooted in an individualistic understanding of what a nation is. A nation is NOT merely a collection of the individuals in it. A nation is a system, it’s a power structure. We cannot analyze what the US is by looking solely at the people inside it. We must see it as a historically situated society. And as a historically situated society, America is a settler colony.
Tuck and Yang in their piece “Decolonization is not a Metaphor” help us to understand how settler systems absorb “minorities” and integrate them into the colonial project. They explicitly analyze people who are kidnapped from Africa and enslaved in the US, as well their descendants, and show how these people, while certainly not white European bourgeois are never the less engaged in the colonial project because they have to be. Settlerism creates a system of pressures that, once an individual becomes a participant in that system, drive that individual’s interests. Settlers, therefore, represent an entire historical body politic that, regardless of minority status, have systemic interests that are in opposition to the national sovereignty of the indigenous people whose oppression is renewed every single moment the settler colony continues to exist.
A revolutionary socialist state must, of necessity, repress any factions that are opposed to the existence of that state. Therefore, a revolutionary socialist state driven by patriotism for a settler nation, must of necessity repress indigenous movements for national self-direction. This is a clear contradiction and I cannot state this emphatically enough:
THIS IS A CLEAR CONTRADICTION IN THE FORMULATION OF PATRIOTIC SOCIALISM IN AND OF SETTLER COLONIES
If we do not address this contradiction, it is clear that Patriotic Socialism in settler colonies are building a system with an internal contradiction that requires it to maintain the violent oppression of indigenous peoples. It is clear that Patriotic Socialism in settler colonies legitimize the settler colonial form of imperialism as a basis for national self-direction.
The implications of this are that a PatSoc revolutionary state in a settler colony will have the following potential outcomes:
The problem with number 3 is that there is so far no analysis that shows this is possible. Settler colonists have no recognized legitimate claim to national sovereignty. The power of settler colonists to engage in collaboration with indigenous peoples is based entirely on their power to oppress those indigenous peoples, the historical extermination of those peoples and their material society, and a centuries long unbroken chain of systemic oppression.
All analyses of this question have determined that the only non-contradictory path forward is full inversion of the power dynamic - national self-direction must be stripped from settler colonists, including ADOS, “minorities”, and other “non-white Europeans” and handed over entirely to indigenous peoples.
The PatSoc movements within settler colonies simply chooses to ignore this contradiction by assuming they can resolve it after they have power, that the most important thing is to get critical mass of the largest group of people (the settler working class) and establish the revolutionary state. Given the above 2 outcomes, this is clearly factually incorrect and the decision to ignore the contradiction is idealism.
There’s at least one more major error in your analysis.
This is an absolute non-sequitur. It is not the case that the entertainment and news media is the cause of the analysis that leads to the understanding of the US as mainly labor aristocrats. You are incorrect that labor aristocracy is equivalent with the upper middle class PMC. Literally every worker in the US, Canada, Scandinavia, and the EU can be described as labor aristocracy. The reason for this is that every single person in these countries, regardless of class, benefits immensely from US hegemony, imperialism, and power projection.
Infrastructure, medicine, fuel, rare earth metals, pollution displacement (from minor to life threatening), plastics, cheap commodities, hot water… literally every aspect of everyday life, from public transportation to private car service, from McDonald’s meals to Michelin Star restaurants, from plastic food wrap to hypodermic needles to Funko Pops to cell phones… ALL of it, including their quantity, variety, availability, cost, utility, and relations between and among it all, ALL of it is predicated on global hegemony through power projection, currently channeled through the European settler colonial nation of the USA, a hegemony that was historically developed by European imperial powers like France, Spain, England, Portugal, and The Netherlands.
The analysis is not based on propaganda. The analysis is based on interests. And the interests of the labor aristocracy are in opposition to the interests of the proletariat of the Global South. When the US loses its hegemony over the world, the price of fuel will increase for Americans almost immediately. Literally every single person the US, regardless of class, will find that this is against their own material interests. And there’s nothing that can be done about it in less than 30 years, because every single residential community is built for cars and every single home is under-insulated and not constructed for passive temperature management. Converting everything to electric will take decades, and even then, doing so still requires access to cheap rare earth materials. When American global hegemony ends, the price of rare earth materials will immediately increase.
There is no escape from this analysis. ALL Americans, Canadians, and Europeans will suffer from the end of US hegemony. Every single one from top to bottom. And this is why the working class in America has been deemed to be Labor Aristocracy. Not because of sitcoms and TV dramas, but because of the material analysis of their interests and how those interests materially incentivize their collective action against the interests of the global proletariat.
Given this analysis, a Patriotic Socialist movement in the US runs the very real risk of becoming a National Socialist movement:
And given these three contradictions, the clear risk is that of the formation of a reactionary state, driven by the interests of the labor aristocracy, with local and global oppression rationalized by patriotism, armed with history’s largest military distributed in over 800 locations around the globe, with the entirety of Europe and NATO sharing in the interests of the Labor Aristocracy to maintain coercive hegemony.
Thanks for taking the time to write this. I appreciate that you have responded to my question. I don’t disagree with your conclusion, although you seem to have phrased this as if we are not on the same side, which is unfortunate.
Given the threats of bans and purges, there is not much room left to discuss and criticise. I feel that I can safely add and must add, before I am accused of being a ‘PatSoc’:
This is not a contradiction. America is derived from the name of an Italian explorer. The concept of indigenous peoples exists only in contrast to settler. For indigenous people to have sovereignty is not patriotism. There is no civic or cultural nationalism involved here. It is about power, not about ideology. Patriotism is an ideology, that is, it is a set of beliefs instantiated in the minds of a group of people such these beliefs guide their behavior. That is not what decolonization requires, decolonization only requires transference of power.
The definition I’m working with - socialism that uses cultural and civic nationalism as an aesthetic and as a framework for prioritizing and deprioritizing aspects of intersectionality.
There’s a lot of reasons for this, but it’s not a problem of analysis but of the mechanics discourse. Patriotic Socialism is a problem everywhere. In settler colonies, especially USA, Canada, Australia, but also inclusive of ALL states that exist on “The Americas”, the problem of Patriotic Socialism runs into the problem of colonization. But the problem of Patriotic Socialism in non-colonial states shows up constantly because it deprioritizes intersectionality to the point of dismissing it as bourgeois ideology. When those types of claims are made, it’s a very clear step in the progression to violent repression of minorities. PatSocs the world over make the argument that we must not demand tolerance, but rather build a big tent and bring into the movement people who would vote in favor of violently oppressing marginalized communities. If it was just aesthetics, no one would have a problem with PatSocs. It’s not just aesthetics. It’s tactics. PatSocs consistently prioritize populist tactics that threaten the safety of marginalized communities because they put forth a theory of action that says larger numbers are more important than ending oppression of marginalized groups.
It’s not just US-centric crticisms, PatSocs are simply arguing that anti-patsoc arguments don’t apply to them if they don’t exist in a settler-colonial state. You can tell they’re disingenuous because they then turn around and argue in another debate that Israeli settlers in Palestine aren’t a problem because the settler colony will eventually dissolve from its own contradictions so in the meantime it’s fine for Palestinians to get mass murdered in the worlds largest open-air prison.
You said:
I don’t think this is important for our discussion at all, because I think its factually incorrect and pure speculative tripe. Any presentation of the US as mainly labor aristocratic does not, in fact, accept the vision of entertainment and news media. If you think you’re arguing in good faith by latching on to my use of the words “upper middle class”, and then using that framing to completely erase how baseless your original claim here was, you need to re-examine how you engage in discourse.
Decolonization is a euro-centric framework because Europeans did the colonization. Criticisms of European nationalism have deep roots that are connected to US nationalism because the US is a European colony. To say that Patriotic Socialism in Europe is somehow different that Patriotic Socialism in the US because the US is a settler colony is to ignore that fact that it is European patriotism that created and sustained the US. The critiques of US Patriotic Socialism traverse the ocean and come home to European socialists because the contradictions in Patriotic Socialism exist regardless of what continent you’re on. The demand of European PatSocs to never have to contend with the contradictions of Patriotic Socialism if the critique mentions settlerism is merely deflection and a claim to innocence to protect themselves from the very real criticism that Patriotic Socialism is 100% of the time used, in practice, to rationalize exclusion of existing marginalized communities.
It’s not merely definitions, it’s analysis. The people who feel like they are disagreeing on the definition of patriotic socialism are either people who have not engaged rigorously with the theory and historical and contemporary practice of Patriotic Socialism, or they are deliberately trying to obfuscate the analysis with a No True Scotsman fallacy.
😻 This is my favorite Lemmy comment.
In another thread I literally just got done quote-mining on the topic of racism inherent to patriotism itself, esp in the West, and how racist or labor aristocratic splits gave 20th century socialist movements the crumbles.
Wonderful comment comrade, you’ve hit the nail on the head. I was going to do my labor aristocracy post, but there’s no need.
Unfortunately, there are many that do. You basically say the same thing as me, that patriotism has class characteristics, and i already gathered a lot of denials of this in Lemmy, and at least 2 bans at reddit and a ban threat here. I don’t see this as a nonissue, since the “antipatriotism” accusation is and always was one of the major tactic of class enemies against us, and it was an effective one. While reversed in AES, served greatly to secure the people’s interests.
Again, i’m not even questioning the USA conditions, since i know it’s more complicated there, but the american exceptionalism being inevitably forced on everyone in such american-dominated internet space like here or especially reddit. That’s why i propose to stop using the word “patsoc” entirely, especially those are apparently just some youtube circlejerk, and start using the good old description of “socialchauvinists” since it’s cleare it what they apparently are (also, few threads later, still nobody could even narrow who are “they”, such nebulous group make it hard to even see entire issue as anything but a hot air)
This is good work.
Might I bring up that amongst the proles; you have those that see the stars and stripes the way most see the nazi flag. I unironically do. Usually when Im out in public, I get a sinister sense of danger when I see the American flag in certain contexts. Protests, rallies, vehicles with the flag flying on them such as pickup trucks, or in people’s yards with varying thin color line bullshit.
But you also have proles that sees the revolutionary potential that we were raised to believe in when seeing the stars and stripes. For many, the flag represents standing up to tyrants and bullies.
Then there is the question of what does it even mean to be patriotic as a revolutionary in America. What is patriotic in the American sense if you hope for and strive for a new society and country that is yet to exist?
Seems like a huge problem of aesthetics. But I honestly can not blame revolutionary folks in America for getting sekf defensive when presented with American trappings and being presented with an American historical narrative of revolution that has been a struggle AGAINST America itself. 🤷
Well put. I am similarly revulsed by ‘my’ flag.