The socialist movement of the United States grows, slowly but surely. The country experiences a crisis of identity, and a concomitant reconsideration of its history. The people ask — how can we change the way things work, how can we change it so that it works for the majority of us? They also ask — Is slavery foundational to our republic? Is Indigenous genocide? The two confrontations are closely interrelated, but their relation is highly contentious.
For socialists, this is a question of the relation of a nascent socialist movement and socialist society to identity, patriotism, and the history thereof. In what movement there is, there can provisionally be said to be two poles to this question between questions.
On the one hand, there are those Romantics who advocate an absolute rejection of American identity as inherently blood-soaked with the crimes of settler-colonial genocide, slavery, and global empire. This entails a fundamental condemnation of US history as a history of slavery and genocide, and as nothing to take pride in or identify with if one wishes to change the world. I am not so interested in this group here, although I do not share the logic of their position by any means.
The other pole, which I am concerned with in this essay, are those who have taken up a mantle of “patriotic socialism.” For them, the anti-Americanists are “national nihilists” with a one-sided view of US history. They believe that patriotism is in fact a natural form for socialism to take in the US. The arguments they make for this vary, but tend to posit that a rejection of the nation or national identity is anti-populist and disconnects us from the history of the country.
Very importantly, they claim to hold a “dialectical” position in contrast to the “undialectical” view of the former. Why? Because, in their eyes, to be “dialectical” is to see both sides of something — good and bad. The United States has engaged in horrific violence throughout its history, but this shouldn’t lead us to forget its history of egalitarianism, radicalism, populism and so on. Thus, we should wholeheartedly identify with the unity of American patriotism and the icons of American history, from Washington to Lincoln.
With this view, we go from impotent flag burners to impotent flag worshippers. Certainly, this country’s history must be considered concretely, specifically rather than targeted with an abstract, homogenous condemnation. Such a negation is no real negation at all, as it becomes purely an identification with the negative mirror image of what one obsesses with rejecting wholesale. Radical negation is dialectical negation, immanent negation, negation from within and through a grounded critique. Yet, the “patriotic socialists” in no way embody this approach, whatever they think.
To put it bluntly, any concept of dialectic which conceives of it as seeing two sides to everything is no dialectic at all. Ironically, this is something Karl Marx critiqued directly as it manifested in the French libertarian Pierre-Joseph Proudhon. Against Proudhon’s good-bad approach, Marx forwarded an approach rooted in the dialectic of immanent critique:
“The good side and the bad side, the advantages and drawbacks, taken together form for M. Proudhon the contradiction in every economic category. The problem to be solved: to keep the good side, while eliminating the bad[…]
[…]Indeed, from the moment the process of the dialectic movement is reduced to the simple process of opposing good to bad, and of administering one category as an antidote to another, the categories are deprived of all spontaneity; the idea “ceases to function”; there is no life left in it. It is no longer posed or decomposed into categories. The sequence of categories has become a sort of scaffolding. Dialectics has ceased to be the movement of absolute reason. There is no longer any dialectics but only, at the most, absolutely pure morality.”¹
While in this context, Marx was aiming at Proudhon’s conception of technology under capitalism having two sides, it applies for this conception of dialectic more broadly. In fact, in this very same chapter, he extends Proudhon’s approach to slavery. Marx, about as radical an abolitionist as it got, quite presciently mocked Proudhon in this manner:
“Slavery is an economic category like any other. Thus it also has its two sides. Let us leave alone the bad side and talk about the good side of slavery[…] Cause slavery to disappear and you will have wiped America off the map of nations.”²
It is quite ironic and interesting to see that here Marx recognizes slavery as very much constitutive to the US. Here, Marx’s point is that a thing cannot be taken as an abstract, given unity. To take it as a neutral thing, having a clearly identifiable and separable good and bad side wherein the good must be separated from the bad, is to assume the unity itself is static. The appearance of givenness is necessarily the start of any dialectical critique, but it must be picked apart by the labor of the negative.
Again and again, Marx emphasized that the “good” and “bad” side of things are not two facets, but are inherently bound up and intertwined. They cannot be separated, they cannot be spoken of on one side without the other. In his polemic with Proudhon, Marx showed that the “progressive” aspects of modern technology are inseparable from their massification and standardization of human beings, their role as a weapon in class struggle and exploitation³
The unity of the thing cannot be taken as just a neutral given, but must be understood as a determinate, contingent historical product. Patriotism, thus, must be understood in this manner rather than as an unmediated, objective existence of a social community. Patriotism is not the immediate, “natural” identity of a community of people. Patriotism more broadly is a historical-social product, and concrete instances of patriotism are especially so. They must be analyzed and critiqued determinately rather than with a slapdash approach which merely asserts the necessity of patriotism for any mass movement anywhere at any time.
In this very polemic of Marx’s, why did he attack Proudhon for his good-bad “dialectic?” Because “there is no life left in it.” Deriving good and bad sides from the unity of a reified concept destroys human agency in making history, in making social relations, in making identities. This is not to say people make things as they please, but that in making history in circumstances not of their own choosing, they are very much making history out of what has been given to them by historical inheritance.
A good-bad “dialectic” does not start with everyday life, concreteness, or contingency. In other words, it does not start with living people. It takes things as set on a categorically imposed path, on a One Destiny which it derives from the apparent inherent premises of categories it merely assumes from the outset. This is not Marx’s dialectic. It is nowhere close to any dialectic of freedom and self-recreation.
The practical activity of the masses in history already contains immanently within it the implication of logics, of concepts. There is not a single, absolutely foundational principle pre-derived in this activity. To live means to live many possibilities within and through what is already given to you. There are manifold potentialities in social activity. We need not foreclose possibilities by claiming a single path, but must evaluate what is strongest, what is rooted, what is most emancipatory. “Patriotic socialism” has not even reached this point — it is still at the level of an abstract notion of the “nation.” It has not yet come down to earth, where the working people live their everyday lives under the despotism of capital.
American Patriotism — Revolutionary?
The “patriotic socialists” operate under a fundamental premise that US patriotism is inherently anti-imperial — having been born out of a struggle with the British Empire — and revolutionary, and thus as natural a form for socialism to take as any. They are quite in the vein of Alexis de Tocqueville, praising the US as without rank, without groveling, perhaps even without class save for the class of financier parasites they consider to be grafted onto the ready-made nation.
Certainly, there are quite radical elements in the history of this country. There is a reason that aspects of it have been a major historical point of reference for revolutionary movements elsewhere —The French and Haitian Revolutions, the wave of Latin American independence in the 1810s -1820s, the spirit of 1848 in Europe, the early global decolonization movement... Facets of the US’s society and history have served as a point of reference for those seeking to break aristocracy, monarchy, empire…
But are these principles inherently bound up with a patriotic identity? If there are other options for a radical popular identity rooted in local history, what are they? Are there potential critiques of this patriotic approach which point to alternatives?
For one, this position once again offers a quite one-sided view of the US War of Independence and foundation of the Republic. Even if its proponents acknowledge the importance of settler-colonialism and slavery to the early Republic, their good-bad “dialectic” leads them to a very crude dismissal of that as a circumstantial flaw.
Quite different to Marx identifying slavery as foundational to the US’s morphology! They lack a critical view of the formatively conservative nature of US revolution — consider the consistent appeals to the “rights of Englishmen,” the defense of slavery and the absolute sovereignty of slaveholders as brothers in the community of private property, the horror at British paternalistic diplomatic protections of Indigenous peoples from settlers…
Thomas Paine was the most radical figure of the early Republic, and he was ostracized for his more authentic commitment to the leveling principles verbally espoused by its leaders. The man was too radical for the nascent Republic, and yet while in the new French Republic he stood as a moderate at most.
Compare Paine, the radical fringe of the United States, to the French communist Gracchus Babeuf, the radical fringe of the French Republic. Paine’s advocacy for universal suffrage, encompassing the working classes as well as the bourgeoisie, for a directly representative government, and for abolition were certainly brave positions in the US. But this tells us more about the US’s foundational conservatism than anything.
If America rejected rank of title, it embraced rank of race. If it rejected monarchy and praised republican government, it considered Indigenous peoples unworthy of their own self-governance and rendered Africans the commodified chattel of free men. If it rejected the monarchical British Empire, it embraced Thomas Jefferson’s Empire of Liberty.
These pairs of twins in the history of the United States are not merely manifestations of the good and the bad sides of these concepts. They were constitutive to each other, inseparable. The US was, and is, a Herrenvolk (master race) democracy. Equality for those within the master race, for those within the universal of citizenship, and subordination for those without.
Certainly, these themes have varied quite radically, and the tumultuous nature of the party systems in the 19th century proves this strikingly. The main point, nevertheless, is that a unity-concept like “citizenship” in US history is both one of equality within and one of a constricted totality where those outside of it are damned for exploitation, genocide, and other forms of oppression.
W.E.B. Du Bois, in his Black Reconstruction in America, offered a genuinely dialectical way of viewing this:
“The opportunity for real and new democracy in America was broad. Political power was at first as usual confined to property holders and an aristocracy of birth and learning. But it was never securely based on land. Land was free and both land and property were possible to nearly every thrifty worker. Schools began early to multiply and open their doors even to the poor laborer. Birth began to count for less and less and America became to the world a land of opportunity. So the world came to America, even before the Revolution, and afterward during the nineteenth century, nineteen million immigrants entered the United States.
The new labor that came to the United States, while it was poor, used to oppression and accustomed to a low standard of living, was not willing, after it reached America, to regard itself as a permanent laboring class and it is in the light of this fact that the labor movement among white Americans must be studied. The successful, well-paid American laboring class formed, because of its property and ideals, a petty bourgeoisie ready always to join capital in exploiting common labor, white and black, foreign and native. The more energetic and thrifty among the immigrants caught the prevalent American idea that here labor could become emancipated from the necessity of continuous toil and that an increasing proportion could join the class of exploiters, that is of those who made their income chiefly by profit derived through the hiring of labor.”⁴
For Du Bois, the opportunities of America and its racial division of labor and racialized exploitation were inseparable. There was not two distinct “good” and “bad” sides, but a dialectical totality of a relation of freedom through the unfreedom of others. In his narrative, echoing Marx’s mockery of Proudhon through the example of slavery, the contradictions in this relation exploded from within into the social revolution that was the Civil War. This was not a case of a tame isolation of the good from the bad, but a revolution aiming to transcend the unity of slave society and Union for slaveholders. For some, it was a struggle to be turned against Herrenvolk democracy itself.
Although not directly identified by Du Bois, this freedom-unfreedom dialectic was and is extremely important in US settler-colonialism. The access to land of the landless from Europe was through the expense of Indigenous peoples, and the growing influx of “surplus population” from a Europe producing paupers through enclosure, capitalist development, and war pit these settlers as holding directly contradictory interests to Indigenous peoples. One group gained or held land at the expense of another. Of course, this dual relation existed through various networks of alliances, often with some nations allying with the settlers against others. However, a Manichaean logic was quite evident and identified by Tenskwatawa (Shawnee) in discussing his doctrine of the Master of Life that the Euro-Americans had been made by:
“another spirit who made and governed the whites and over whom or whose subjects he [the Master of Life] had no control[…] The Americans I did not make. They are not my children, but the children of the Evil Spirit.”⁵
Despite what “patriotic socialists” say, settlerism, bourgeois individualism, Herrenvolk identity etc. continue to be constitutive to the morphology of the US capitalist empire and its dominant forms of patriotism. As The Red Nation has argued, settler-colonialism informed the very earliest imperial foreign policy of the US, and its engagement with Indigenous nations was just as formative to its identities as with the British Empire.⁶
The United States has not only historically seen its targets of empire like Mexico, Puerto Rico, Cuba, the Philippines, Korea, Vietnam, Afghanistan and others in terms of Indigenous “savages.” It has also taken up methods of colonization and counterinsurgency which it developed in forging its continental empire, especially in strategies against guerrilla warfare.⁷
In the continental United States itself, settler-colonialism is not “over” by any means, nor is it immaterial for the morphology of US imperialist capitalism. The American capitalists continue their drive to expropriate peoples from their lands and land rights, concentrating land to accrue rents, to engage in industrial agriculture, to build destructive pipelines, and generally to ensure the operation of its global empire.
Treaty disputes have a very immediate and very real relevance to everyday life and our social relations — take, for example, the ongoing dispute over Line 3. Indigenous peoples continue to represent an identifiable material force in society, and one wherein the working classes come into conflict with capital as it seeks to dissolve and vampirize their communities. Indigenous peoples are not marginal to, but central to struggles against capital within and outside of this country.
Compare this obsession of these “patriotic socialists” with this identity to how they think about Israeli settler-colonialism and their hypocrisy is especially evident. Few if any of them would advocate for socialists who are citizens of the state of Israel to deploy Israeli patriotism to fight for socialism. There is a general consensus, outside of the liberal left at least, that supporting the liberation of Palestine is the progressive position. Clearly, the determinate character, history, and morphology of patriotism and national identity matter.
Despite what these people might say, Zionism is not very different from the Americanism they praise — It was formatively anti-colonial if one means being against the British Empire, it has a strong value of egalitarianism among citizens, and it even holds a more constitutive connection to socialism through the strong influence of Labor Zionism and the kibbutzim movement. And yet, settlerism is also formative to Zionism, and inseparable from its morphology rather than just a “bad” side to be separated from the “good.”
In the US’s morphology, settlerism is certainly more “hidden” and not as loudly proclaimed anymore, but it is still formative, as demonstrated earlier. These “patriotic socialists” might say the viability of a strategy against settler-colonialism is different, since Israel is surrounded by regional opponents and targets of its empire who have political, cultural, and community connections with the local indigenous population.
Yet, this is true of the US as well — the settler empire extends south of the border, as do the networks of colonized communities. By the mid-20th century, the project of an Indo-Americanism à la José Carlos Mariátegui absolutely had its conscious adherents in North America. Take, for example, the influential 1977 Haudenosaunee “Basic Call to Consciousness” given at the UN Geneva Conference. The rhetoric of this speech must be kept in mind as said in the context of a pan-American contingent of Indigenous peoples appealing for their rights, rather than only North American:
“The traditional Native peoples hold the key to the reversal of the processes in Western Civilization which hold the promise of unimaginable future suffering and destruction. Spiritualism is the highest form of political consciousness. And we, the Native peoples of the Western hemisphere, are among the world’s surviving proprietors of that kind of consciousness. We are here to impart that message.”⁸
In this country’s history, there is a consistent theme of there being radical, critical edges outside (sovereign Indigenous peoples, the Mexican Republic, the Haitian Republic, the Cuban Republic, the Soviet Union, the People’s Republic of China etc.) and the radical, critical edges within (David Walker, Maria Stewart, Frederick Douglass, Wendell Phillips, Lucy Parsons, Eugene V. Debs, D’Arcy McNickle, Malcolm X, etc.) who both tend to be critical of the main threads of US patriotism. Further, they tend to overlap, as mentioned in the example of Indo-Americanism.
Their main relation to Americanism has been to challenge it, to question it, to critique it. Certainly, many of them at various times have advocated a notion of an authentic Americanism against the actuality of Americanism. But their coherence as distinct tendencies relative to Americanism have been in their critical edge.
Are these stances inherently, necessarily bound up in patriotism? To position them as merely the “good” side of patriotism against the “bad” side of its actuality in the American Empire is the flat, mechanical, and abstract nonsense Marx critiqued in Proudhon. We must reject this static conception of patriotism as posited by these “patriotic socialists” which already extends to the whole history of the continent and forecloses all of its possibilities.
To discuss the determinate, contingent aspects of identification and ideology in material everyday situations is to leave open possibilities and to take our lead from real people instead of from an abstract, calcified concept. In looking at this history, we can see such critical examples as Indigenous non-identification with the American nation-state — Luther Standing Bear (Sicangu, Oglala Lakota), for example, said:
“The white man does not understand the Indian for the reason that he does not understand America. He is too far removed from its formative processes. The roots of the tree of his life have not yet grasped the rock and soil. The white man is still troubled with primitive fears; he still has in his consciousness the perils of this frontier continent, some of its fastness not yet having yielded to his questioning footsteps and inquiring eyes. He shudders still with the memory of the loss of his forefathers upon its scorching deserts and forbidding mountain-tops. The man from Europe is still a foreigner and an alien. And he still hates the man who questioned his path across the continent.
“But in the Indian the spirit of the land is still vested; it will be until other men are able to divine and meet its rhythm. Men must be born and reborn to belong. Their bodies must be formed of the dust of their forefather’s bones.”⁹
Black radical politics have a long history of nationalism, a consciousness of difference and a desire for autonomy yet also desire for rights as an oppressed people internal to the American Republic. Take the example of Frederick Douglass’s engagement with the United States government in Reconstruction and afterward. Before the Civil War, he quite adamantly attacked the United States as formatively bound up with the enslavement of his people:
“Yes; the Americans, as a nation, were guilty of the foul crime of slavery, whatever might be their hypocritical vaunts of freedom. It was not his wish to condemn republicanism, but the slavery that was identified with it; but it was not a true democracy, but a bastard republicanism that enslaved one-sixth of the population. — They were free booters who wished to be free to plunder every one within their reach — stretching their long, bony fingers into Mexico, and appropriating her territory to themselves in order to make it a hot bed of negro slavery. Mexico with all her barbarism and darkness had wiped away the stain of slavery from her dominions, and now the enlightened, Christian United States had stained again what was washed. He wanted them to know, and if there was a reporter present they would know that a slave had stood up in Limerick and ridiculed their democracy and their liberty.”¹⁰
With the burst of social revolution in the Civil War, he did in fact seek to make common cause with the Union. Yet, he also recognized a continuing non-identity of Union and Emancipation, and the possibility of the former to subordinate or even foreclose the latter. In 1880, the aftermath of Reconstruction, he positioned the relation thusly:
“In the hurry and confusion of the hour, and the eager desire to have the Union restored, there was more care for the sublime superstructure of the republic than for the solid foundation upon which it could alone be upheld….”¹¹
In Mexicano identity-formation, there has been a long history of an insider-outsider relation and sense of distinctness from America — the Corrido de Joaquin Murrieta, for example, opens with the line:
“I am not American/but I understand English/forward and backward/I make any American/tremble at my feet”¹²
Even in the working classes as a political identification, there is certainly an identifiable thread of this that taking a monopolizing, a priori concept forecloses. The IWW, for instance, one of the most radical and universalist unions of American history, sung:
“What matters now your flag, your race, the skill/Of scattered legions-what has been the gain?/Once more beneath the lash you must distil /Your lives to glut a glory wrought of pain./In peace they starve you to your loathsome toil, In war they drive you to the teeth of Death;/And when your life-blood soaks into their soil They give you lies to choke your dying breath./So will they smite your blind eyes till you see, And lash your naked backs until you know/That wasted blood can never set you free/ From fettered thraldom to the Common Foe./Then you will find that “nation” is a name And boundaries are things that don’t exist;/That Labor’s bondage, world-wide, is the same,/And ONE the enemy it must resist.”¹³
While all of these threads are identifiable as elements of “America,” they cannot be foreclosed as purely internal to “America” or American patriotism. They are in a complex engagement of an insider-outsider dialectic and their main stance, as I said, is one which is critical.
These revolutionary tendencies have usually been critical of Americanism because of the class bloc and web of social relations which represent the actuality of America. America’s actuality was built on slavery, genocide, colonialism, and the exploitative instrumentalization of the working classes. There are pitfalls in patriotism tied to this determinate, actual character — one cannot make a simple separation of “spirit” from history. It is not that an already-given concept of “America” has manifested itself at various points in history, here more authentic and here more distorted. It is that the ideas and actualities of America have emerged through concrete practices which are formative to the dialectics of its identification.
To defer purely to patriotism risks making peace with what is, taking up the logic of what one seeks to transform into oneself. This has real historical manifestations even in the most radical of social movements. Take, for example, the late 19th century wave of the Grange, People’s Party, and Free Silver movements. This wave, taking up an idea of the “real America” against the rise of a capitalist plutocracy, also at various points fell into racial populism.
By the early 20th century, with the failure to break the two-party system, many former adherents would join the ranks of the anti-immigration movement and other forms of white supremacy.¹⁴ The notion of “American” has historically been closely bound up with “white” — even such a foundational document as the Naturalization Act of 1790, defining eligibility for citizenship, immediately specified a prerequisite of “being a free white person.”¹⁵
Uncritically taking up these categories as as-is unities can lead to an internalization of this logic that can unfold like the example of the radicals of the People’s Party, fixated on a white American identity in that multiracial historical block, who unfolded into a white supremacist populism. One must engage in a historical critique, asking about the history and actuality of social categories and identities as inherently bound up with relations and practices.
To implicitly or explicitly organize around “white” in a multi-racial approach takes a category as-given which has historically been produced as a means of exclusion and identification of the not-white as the not-citizens or not-Americans, a category which is a means of social control and social warfare against the proletariat composing itself as a class. The same pitfall lays immanent in a fetishistic adoption of patriotism.
Yet another issue, genuinely “undialectical,” in the “patriotic socialists” is their obsession with rejecting and attacking the Romantic flag burners without asking: Why is there a significant rejection of US patriotism among leftists today? This calls for a serious investigation and consideration rather than dismissively fitting reality into abstract, polemical categories like “petit-bourgeois radicalism.” To engage with this and to follow its threads is to engage in a dialectical immanent critique.
Without getting too off track, the immediate roots of the contemporary disillusionment with patriotism can be traced to that of the New Left, where the myth-making of 20th century, post-WWII America was shattered by its horrendous behavior in the Vietnam War. Groups like the SNCC and New Communist Movement organizations began to reject patriotism. This isn’t necessarily the first time this occurred — in a real sense, it was a radicalization of an existing anti-imperial critique with history going back to the opposition to Mexican-American War and earlier. Even a man like Ulysses S. Grant, stricken with guilt over his participation, said of it “I am always ashamed of my country when I think of that invasion.”¹⁶
Yet there is clearly an identifiable qualitative shift from seeing the US as becoming the very tyranny its values are founded on rejecting to a historical re-evaluation of these values to their very core — but why? To understand this, we must comprehend the masses as the makers of meaning and as driving reconsiderations and re-orientations of history. As Walter Benjamin said:
“To articulate what is past does not mean to recognize “how it really was.” It means to take control of a memory, as it flashes in a moment of danger. For historical materialism it is a question of holding fast to a picture of the past, just as if it had unexpectedly thrust itself, in a moment of danger, on the historical subject.”¹⁷
The contemporary “Indigenous turn” is not a product of some delusion or pathology. This re-evaluation of Americanism, going back to its very roots, certainly is very different to the early to mid-20th century radical rhetorics on Americanism which spoke of redeeming the authentic America from the actual America. To consider this as merely a degeneration is to approach the question without historicity. Or, to use a favorite rhetorical club of the “patriotic socialists” once again, to be undialectical.
This problematic or line of inquiry has emerged historically through the political action of colonized Indigenous peoples within the United States. In particular, the global wave of decolonization and the concomitant Pan-Indigenous sovereignty movement of the mid-20th century provoked in a very practical sense a reconsideration of history. Indigenous masses forced themselves into visibility and, through such actions as the 1971 Alcatraz Occupation, the 1977 appeal to the UN, and 1978 Longest Walk, quite directly exposed the formative relation of settler-colonialism and American historical morphology. Pan-Indigenism itself had emerged as a new force in this period due to the very colonial assimilatory and paternalistic policies of the late 19th and early 20th century, which rendered “Indian” a practically coherent category among many distinct nations through a more standardized relation to colonial state.
Today, Indigenous movements are highly visible and stand at the forefront of action against capital, through such avenues as food sovereignty, legal autonomy, opposition to encroachment, opposition to colonial violence, and opposition to ecological destruction. Thus, this more foundational critique has a practical basis in the direct exposure of the continuity of settler-colonialism and a growing global consciousness of this relation. “Indigenous” is a popular identity and categorical logic of mobilization on the local, national, continental, and global level.
Indigenous critiques of Americanism are quite unique in their relation to the mainstream of the United States as the First Peoples of this region, and thus as having a constitutive colonial relation to the country. That is, they were the first people the country turned to as “outside” and wished to render an object of its actions and goals, whether through subordination, assimilation, or extermination. While today, they are “inside” of the US’s society through the colonial relation and through the extension of citizenship in the 1924 Indian Citizenship Act, they are also distinct and sovereign from Americanism.
Indigenous communities today are the ultimate insider-outsiders here, looking upon the US from within from a distinct social tradition. Thus, people like Luther Standing Bear (Sicangu, Oglala Lakota) offer such insight as that “The white man does not understand the Indian for the reason that he does not understand America.”
In his view, and the American Empire stands as without relatives. This analysis has been echoed in the modern day by Nick Estes (Lower Brulé Sioux).¹⁷ This critique is the indigenous insider-outsider critique of what settlers are familiar with through the notion of virgin land. The two notions are inseparable in the context of a settler-colonial world its relations, and are identifiable as part of one unity.
Yet they are also very much distinct. This has become evident even in the contemporary popularization of “Turtle Island” as an alternative name to “America.” “Turtle Island” originates from Great Lakes and Eastern Woodlands peoples rather than being a truly Pan-Indigenous nomenclature, but its “authenticity” in the sense of preceding colonialism is not so important as what it signifies within and against the colonial relation.
This is not by any means to imply that Indigenous peoples are homogenous, of course. There are distinctions in these communities in forms and degrees of assimilation, of sovereignty, of gender relations, class distinctions and so on. There is a reason, however, that it is the Federal-aligned leadership and capitalist classes who tend to favor Euro-”modernization,” and the popular radicals who tend to favor “traditionalism.”¹⁹
Ultimately, my point following from Marx and the examples of North American history is to emphasize the need for contingencies in revolutionary identity. This requires an immanent engagement with history and the people who are now making history rather than any a prior, good-bad “dialectic.”
These situations and concepts have many possibilities and concepts. Take the example of the claim that US patriotism is necessarily anti-colonial, because it opposed the British Empire. This is certainly formative to Americanist morphology, but there are many colonialisms and many anti-colonialisms — many forms of domination — in this history. The US opposition British colonialism went hand in hand with the notion of an “Empire of Liberty” expanding into Indigenous homelands, and with the liberty of the enslaver over the enslaved.
To analyze in the realm of contingency, refusing to foreclose possibilities, means to analyze according to determinate situations and ask what is immanent, what has the greatest actuality and greatest potential for revolutionary universalism. An example I have identified as a powerful vehicle for revolutionary rhetoric is the history and legacy of abolitionism. Abolitionism was the mother of feminism, Black liberation, anti-imperialism, the labor movement, and radical concerns for Indigenous peoples in North America. Marx identified the centrality of it and opposition to racist exploitation to the proletarian movement quite insightfully:
“In the United States of North America, every independent movement of the workers was paralysed so long as slavery disfigured a part of the Republic. Labour cannot emancipate itself in the white skin where in the black it is branded. But out of the death of slavery a new life at once arose.”²⁰
Patriotism is by no means the only or even best form for life-affirming, emancipatory movements. The real question is: what is mobilizing people, and what can mobilize people? Right now, it is quite bread and butter concerns. Bread and butter already represents a universal, in that it necessarily includes everyone regardless of race, gender, citizenship, ability, or anything else. This is not to say it is sufficient, but that it is a radical start. There is a potential pitfall in obscuring human particularities, but its initial universalism is an important and revolutionary step.
In Marx’s analysis of the working class struggle to limit the working day, he argued that there was an implicit revolutionary philosophy in struggle for everyday concerns. Even everyday struggles today are positing something about life affirmation, about freedom, about identity which cannot and should not be foreclosed in the abstract notion of narrow patriotism. The workers struggling to unionize Starbucks and Amazon are not really interested in patriotism so much as practically defining a distinction between a good life versus a shit life, the time and concerns of the workers as humans versus the parasitism and one-dimensionality of capitalism.
Revolution means seizing concrete possibilities, blasting open the potentialities immanent in life. Communism must be the revolution of the manifold, concrete working people against the abstract and vampiric force of capital. To make revolution, one must neither become disconnected from what is and posit intellectual utopias or merely affirm what is in one form or another. Against both of these, we must become the inheritors and makers of history and realize the immanence of revolution.
Marx — Advocate of Patriotism?
Having taken a step to redeem our local histories from “patriotic socialism,” let us now take an extended excursion to redeem Marx from their damning and distorting praise. They lay a claim to legitimacy for their position in depicting Marx as an advocate of patriotism more broadly, and American patriotism in particular. This is more or less a lazy appeal to a respected authority rather than showing actual respect to the man by following along with him in living his method. Nevertheless, it brings up a real need to examine the legacy of Marx as a foundation of our method to ask to what extent our previous critique applies to him, or whether these people are accurately representing him.
As extensively argued earlier, a conception of dialectic as seeing two sides in everything is patently alien to Marx’s method of immanent critique. Rather than expressing dialectic as redeeming the good from the bad of a unity-category, Marx discussed dialectic thusly:
“In its rational form it is a scandal and abomination to bourgeoisdom and its doctrinaire professors, because it includes in its comprehension and affirmative recognition of the existing state of things, at the same time also, the recognition of the negation of that state, of its inevitable breaking up; because it regards every historically developed social form as in fluid movement, and therefore takes into account its transient nature not less than its momentary existence; because it lets nothing impose upon it, and is in its essence critical and revolutionary.”²¹
Thus, the basis for our previous rejection of anything which explicitly or implicitly takes unity-concepts as pure givens. I have earlier argued that “patriotic socialism” is guilty of this in its logic of the nation. I think Marx preceded me in many ways in his own work. Namely, through his engagement with the nationalist economist Friedrich List, who not coincidentally had a quite similar ideology to the more vulgar of the “patriotic socialists.” As in his condemnation of Hegel for becoming complacent with the actuality of the Prussian state, Marx condemned List’s logic as preserving a bad unity in the form of the national community. In 1845, Marx said:
“The nationality of the worker is neither French, nor English, nor German, it is labour, free slavery, self-huckstering. His government is neither French, nor English, nor German, it is capital. His native air is neither French, nor German, nor English, it is factory air. The land belonging to him is neither French, nor English, nor German, it lies a few feet below the ground. Within the country, money is the fatherland of the industrialist.
Thus, the German philistine wants the laws of competition, of exchange value, of huckstering, to lose their power. at the frontier barriers of his country! He is willing to recognise the power of bourgeois society only in so far as it is in accord with his interests, the interests of his class! He does not want to fall victim to a power to which he wants to sacrifice others, and to which he sacrifices himself inside his own country! Outside the country he wants to show himself and be treated as a different being from what he is within the country and how he himself behaves within the country! He wants to leave the cause in existence and to abolish one of its effects! We shall prove to him that selling oneself out inside the country has as its necessary consequence selling out outside, that competition, which gives him his power inside the country, cannot prevent him from becoming powerless outside the country; that the state, which he subordinates to bourgeois society inside the country, cannot protect him from the action of bourgeois society outside the country.
However much the individual bourgeois fights against the others, as a class the bourgeois have a common interest, and this community of interest, which is directed against the proletariat inside the country, is directed against the bourgeois of other nations outside the country. This the bourgeois calls his nationality.”²²
This hardly sounds like the words of a patriot. Here, he quite clearly positions the nation as a bad unity for the working classes, and merely an instrumental pretext for the bourgeois. One might argue that this evaluation is specific to the Germany of his day, which was incredibly fragmented. However, List and Marx both spoke of the nation-state, and while they certainly had Germany in mind, they considered their approaches as referring to general principles. Marx in this period certainly underestimated the continuing role of nationality and the state, believing that the abstract universal of “money” would render homogenization of the world. His basic point on the actuality of the nation as a bad unity, however, is correct and continues to be true.
Contrast this to one of the inheritors of List’s nationalism, Oswald Spengler. Spengler advocated an organicist nationalism which united all “productive” classes into a unity (in Marx’s view, a bad unity) rather than into a transformative, universalist revolutionary identity. Marx would consider this ridiculous, a narrow provincialism, and would likely mock it in about the same terms as he did List.
In the 1848 Communist Manifesto, Marx continued to elaborate a very distinct view to anything which forecloses revolutionary, transformative possibilities within a patriotic spirit. There, he commented on the relationship of proletarian revolution and the nation thusly:
“Though not in substance, yet in form, the struggle of the proletariat with the bourgeoisie is at first a national struggle. The proletariat of each country must, of course, first of all settle matters with its own bourgeoisie.”²³
What Marx is talking about here is not a necessarily “patriotic” struggle (“not in substance”), but a breaking apart of the nation-state based global capitalist system from its own premises. The point for him is the analysis of determinate historical conditions and traditions of struggle and transformation, not a petty deference to a patriotically mythologized history.
Marx refused both Romantic attempts to entirely escape the “ground” of history and conservative positivists who merely reproduce or produce apologetics for what is. This is the meaning of immanent critique.
He continued this critical discourse on nationalism upon the birth of the the Paris Commune — for him, the Paris Commune represented a realization of a proletarian form of governance, and a natural form for revolution. On its relation to the nation, he said:
‘The unity of the nation was not to be broken, but, on the contrary, to be organized by Communal Constitution, and to become a reality by the destruction of the state power which claimed to be the embodiment of that unity independent of, and superior to, the nation itself, from which it was but a parasitic excresence.”²⁴
In his evaluation of its organization, he considered their treatment of the nation not as premised in abstract patriotism but in the nation as a social-spatial unit. Instead of the national system of List, promoting a bad unity, the Commune refused this and embraced more radical popular identities. The commune realized a new unity and and universalist identity, based on the real, concrete social relations of the national unit rather than the bourgeois one-sided spirit-forms.
Of course, the French Republican relation to nationalism must be considered in light of determinate French history. Unlike the United States, France was not founded on settler-colonialism. Further, there was already an immanent potential in the outburst of the French Revolution in a radical antithesis of French Nation and French Empire, as manifested through the slave revolutionaries of Haiti initially taking up Frenchness as an identity of mobilization.
However, where the actuality of Frenchness became one based on the preservation of slavery in the wake of the Thermidorian Reaction, the existing potential for a distinction between Haiti and France as between colonized and colonizer burst forth. This is the meaning of Jean-Jacques Dessalines renaming the island from Saint-Domingue to Haiti, after its Taíno name, and declaring “I have avenged America.”²⁵
Clearly, patriotism in revolution cannot be considered always as equivalent to the French Revolutionary experience — nor even the experience in all of its facets. This problematic of patriotism emerges once again in Marx in his engagement with the Union cause during the American Civil War. This period is about the most contentious for contemporary Americans more broadly, and for “patriotic socialists,” a major basis for their argument that Marx advocated in the absolute for American patriotism.
Certainly, Marx threw his weight behind the Union cause. The man was a staunch abolitionist, and from the outset critiqued the Union’s refusal to align the cause of re-Union with Emancipation. This was quite similar to the stance of Black abolitionists like Frederick Douglass. He did not support the actuality of the Union unconditionally, but as a vehicle of the history of freedom. Even in the very oft-cited January 28, 1865 letter he penned on behalf of the International Working Men’s Association to President Abraham Lincoln, he conditioned his praise:
From the commencement of the titanic American strife the workingmen of Europe felt instinctively that the star-spangled banner carried the destiny of their class. The contest for the territories which opened the dire epopee, was it not to decide whether the virgin soil of immense tracts should be wedded to the labor of the emigrant or prostituted by the tramp of the slave driver?²⁶
For him, it was not that America inherently embodied this nascent social revolution, but that it was in so far as Union and Emancipation aligned. As an aside, Marx’s invoking of “virgin soil” is entirely historically inaccurate and lends itself to historical distortion and underestimation of the settler-colonial relation. This issue will be elaborated later, however. Marx continued later in the letter:
While the workingmen, the true political powers of the North, allowed slavery to defile their own republic, while before the Negro, mastered and sold without his concurrence, they boasted it the highest prerogative of the white-skinned laborer to sell himself and choose his own master, they were unable to attain the true freedom of labor, or to support their European brethren in their struggle for emancipation; but this barrier to progress has been swept off by the red sea of civil war.
From this, it is quite clear that Marx rejected any vulgar populist patriotism. He did not spare the workingmen of the United States from critique, and his main aim was revolutionary emancipation which could not be subordinated to the Jacksonian or Republican patriotism of many American workingmen. Like the most radical of the abolitionists, he would align with Americanism only insofar as it served a more radical universalism. Further, it shows quite clearly that Marx rejected the simple race-class distinction and considered the distinct oppression of Black people as just as much formative to the unity of the Union as its drive for “free soil” was.
Marx and Frederick Douglass, in this regard, quite closely mirror each other in their consideration of patriotism as a vehicle for greater universalism. This includes a revolutionary break with the actuality of American laws — Douglass was himself a fugitive. Both Marx and Douglass shared a high estimation of the Republic’s radical principles, but both refused an unconditional fealty to the Republic or to posit a simple separateness between the actuality of values and the institution of slavery.
Where they diverged most is in their evaluation of the Union in the wake of the Civil War. Douglass, living as a Black man in America, expressed much greater caution about President Andrew Johnson than Marx did, who assumed his poor white background would drive him to social revolution against the plantocracy.²⁷ In actuality, Johnson was a disaster to Reconstruction and especially to freedmen. Here, Douglass’s more cautious and determinate analysis of the American working class, from his own experience as a worker, won out. Douglass had a stronger understanding, in a method of knowledge echoing Marx’s own method, of the relation between race and class among the working people of America.
This is not to say that Marx was an idiot on this issue, and completely uncritical of Americanist principles, but that he was not a god. Marx’s own work in the wake of the Civil War expressed a certain radical critique of those very principles perhaps preceding the work of W.E.B. Du Bois:
“In place of the pompous catalogue of the “inalienable rights of man” comes the modest Magna Charta of a legally limited working-day, which shall make clear “when the time which the worker sells is ended, and when his own begins.” Quantum mutatus ab illo! [What a great change from that time! — Virgil]”²⁸
His point here is that the working class cannot be taken abstractly, nor are abstract principles befit of the working class’s struggles. Douglass realized this principle quite clearly in his emphasis on the fact that the working class is racialized, that Black people are racialized as a working race-class. Black people are a racialized class and a classed race. Race is not merely an illusion or delusion, but social relations and the division of labor reified into a pseudo-biological category. This is true of “Black” just as much as white. Because race is based in concrete practices of categorization through division of labor, legal status, and exploitation, there is an immanent potential for taking racial categories as-given in the relation of oppression and transforming them into a vehicle of resistance against that very oppression.
Blackness became a force of reason in history because of the logic of Blackness has been a concrete force in the everyday life of history. The slave trade took Africans as a target of commodification, and melded many distinct peoples into one category. The institution of chattel slavery confined itself to these commodified Africans, making a certain common coherence in Blackness by means of the slave trade and slave labor. State and capital conflated Africanness with Blackness with Slaveness in the division of labor, and so Blackness was born in history as a race class and class race.
Douglass’s approach, as well as Marx’s own realizations in his most critical moments, blast apart the notion of a homogenous working class, of an opposition of race and class, and of a single Spirit of patriotism. For Marx, the working class’s everyday struggles already hold immanently within them a determinate, revolutionary universalism in all of their concreteness. They are not bound to the bad unity of some abstract, Spiritual nationalism, but reach into the radical limits of possibility.
Central to Marx’s critical theory is the critique of the domination of concrete, living things by abstract, dead things. The rise of Indigenous critiques as a force within the US and thus engaged in an internal-external dialectic it represents an expression of a sibling critique, and also something which Marxism must engage with to hone itself. The material force of this critique now exposes in a practical sense the formative settler-colonialism in the United States, the exterminatory, abstracting logic of American capitalism.
Where Marx assumed the land was “virgin,” Indigenous critique quite practically shows that it is not. Not a land without a people, but peoples with homelands. Peoples in relation to the space of homelands, and with long spatial histories of mutual making and being made by these environments. The land of this region is not virgin, but the sedimentation of Indigenous and colonial histories.²⁹
Marx in his own life engaged with nascent Indigenous critiques, just as he engaged with working class critiques and Black critiques.³⁰ Generally, Marx emphasized the genius of the the organic critiques of regular working people, considering their concrete practice the midwives of theory rather than the other way around. Marx was often very cautious, taking care to take his lead from determinate situations and practices rather than falling into the mistake of imposing an all-devouring, all-enclosing abstract dogma on everything. We must follow Marx’s method rather than merely following behind him, and this means engaging with Indigenous critiques as an alternative to his own deficiencies. This was a thread he had began to follow in his late life before he died.
If we work to study the actual the actual determinate history of organizing and identity in the US, including oppressed peoples, we see critiques offer a red thread which must be taken up again—Indigenous struggles for sovereignty, the abolitionist movement, the Industrial Workers of the World, the Partido Liberal Mexicano, the African Blood Brotherhood, the Congress of Industrial Workers, Dodge Revolutionary Union Movement, and so on. By engaging with these practical histories and their critiques, we find a much greater wealth of immanence than any a priori formula of taking the good from the bad sides of patriotism.
Marx took his lead from the real struggles of working and oppressed classes, and so should Marxists. Marx considered communism as to represent a new, disalienated relation to space-time, with the establishment of a universal gemeinschaft or community.
This is not the patriotic nation — he condemned that as an alienated abstraction. In his commentary on the Paris Commune, he considered its actualization of the nation to not be premised in a spiritual, mystical, myth-making patriotism, but in the realization of a concrete universal community in all of its facets. Community is not abstract, but concrete, and manifold. It is the ensemble of social relations, identity through community, the realization of the individual through the community and the community through the individual.
This identification with concrete, social-historical time-space and identification through relationality, once again, has a sibling in Indigenous philosophies. Indigenous peoples identify themselves based on their linkages in community social relations, bound up in particular historical and relationally infused spaces — homelands. As Vine Deloria Jr. argued, Indigenous philosophies refuse the domination of space by time, of the living by the dead, or of land by humans.³¹ Further, Indigenous peoples engage with historical ancestors not as externalized, as alien, but as living through vivacious social relations and everyday social practices.³²
This is a living alternative to bourgeois modernity and its wealth of alienations, exploitations, and destructions. Once again, this is not to homogenize Indigenous peoples — this tradition of critique has largely been kept alive by the “traditionalists,” and has been expressed in history by people like Tecumseh (Shawnee), Tenskwatawa (Shawnee), Geronimo (Mescalero-Chiricahua Apache), Wovoka (Paiute), Ohiyesa (Santee Dakota), Luther Standing Bear (Sicangu, Oglala Lakota), Zitkála-Šá (Yankton Dakota), Ricardo Flores Magón (Zapotec), Emma Tenayuca (Comanche), Vine Deloria Jr. (Standing Rock Sioux), Winona LaDuke (Ojibwe), Nick Estes (Lower Brulé Sioux, and many others.
Indigenous philosophies do not exist in a vacuum, but exist as living philosophies, living critiques, and living alternatives. Indigenous engagements with the nation are especially fruitful for the question which concerns us — namely, their role in bringing forth the approach of plurinationalism. Plurinationalism is a refusal of a homogenous nation, especially assimilation into one citizenship. It is an embrace of unity-in-difference, and a vision of identity wherein Indigenous sovereignty is essential. It is a rejection of colonialism, a vision of decolonization. In history, Indigenous world-views have been very people-place specific and consider the universal and particular to be one.
This communalist and egalitarian tendency was radical within, but also contained the seeds of its own negation in its limitation to withinness and frequent allowance for enslavement or humiliation of outsiders.³³ This was the basis for the rise of class distinctions which colonial diplomacy made so much advantage of, being easier to engage with than a manifold society based on complex networks of reciprocity.³⁴ Through Indigenous engagements with and critiques of this colonial world, these ways of thinking hold a potential for a new universal. Where the colonial capitalist world is a bad universal, a universal domination of the abstract, Indigenous communities represent a vision of a concrete, manifold community.
Indigenous philosophical conceptions of this universal community and a new conception of the nation or identity run through Karl Marx, José Carlos Mariátegui, Emiliano Zapata, Guillermo Bonfil Batalla, the Neozapatistas, and many other people and movements. They point us towards a conception of communism as the reconciliation of individual, particular, and the universal.
Indigenous peoples have been teachers of reciprocity, and were themselves teachers of Marx. In the realization of a new unity, of a new community, we must follow Marx and other radicals in history in emphasizing on freedom in history and not subordinating ourselves to alienated abstractions like “patriotic socialism.” Like Marx, we must reject the domination of the living by the dead, the concrete by the abstract.
Patriotic Socialists— Genuine Marxists?
Having engaged in an extensive critique of “patriotic socialism,” we come to this question — are they even Marxists? Contrast their conception of a socialist volkgeist (people-spirit) to Marx’s determinate, polyvocal, contingent situations of freedom. As mentioned earlier, Marx’s mockery of Friedrich List for his deference to the pure abstraction of the nation, his “patriotism,” certainly contrast to their impotent worship of the flag.
In Marx’s German context, the thread running from List onward in fact leads to a certain revealing comparison. List held quite a similar way of thinking about patriotism and nationality to Bruno Bauer and Eugen Dühring, who Marx and Engels respectively attacked. After Marx’s death, Friedrich Engels had to engage in a struggle with völkisch (folkist) socialists who considered a populist appeal to the German traditions of antisemitism to be a productive manner of getting in line with the German working classes’ “spirit.”
In the late 19th century, this völkisch ideology was on the rise as a response both to the socialist movement and bourgeois society very much echoing List’s attack on bourgeois and proletarian egoism alike in the name of the nation. In fact, the movement considered itself a third force, beyond the “materialism” of capitalists and socialists and committed to a re-spiritualization of life through a popular patriotism.³⁵ They considered the unity of the nation as the means of disalienation, of escaping what they considered to be the nihilism of bourgeois and proletarian socialist specificity. Sound familiar at all?
Völkisch ideology must serve as a reminder to us that critique of capitalism is not necessarily revolutionary. Its critique is premised on the preservation of bad unities — bad unities which we aim at the transcendence of. The point is not merely to oppose capitalism, but to posit an emancipatory alternative to it. To merely fixate on negation leads one to create a mirror image of what one wishes to negate, and thus leaves one unable to seriously realize an alternative.
What völkisch nonsense has to offer is not a revolutionary negation, but a one-sided, moralistic critique of capital. It critiques capital from the standpoint of a collective which stands above the individual and imposes itself on them, rather than an association where the free development of each is the condition of the free development of all. It does not see the determinate, immanent potential for mass transformation, but merely posits one world-vision to another and depends on “re-spiritualization” of life and the role of führers and heroes to realize its Romantic bad unity.
Like the völkisch movement, “patriotic socialists” impotently strike at conjuring up a unity and organic coherence by making the flag and nation as fetishes. They obsess over the absence of presence of “patriotic” symbols or rhetoric at this or that demonstration, seemingly believing that a strike’s entire success lays in whether it has an American flag present, and whether it displays it prominently enough.
On the one hand, this is quite easy to dismiss through mockery as obsessive and pathological — it certainly is. On the other, there’s a real “reasoning” behind it that appears rational to its adherents, trapped within a genuinely undialectical thinking. While in a practical sense, the presence or absence of the flag usually isn’t very relevant, in the thinking of “patriotic socialists,” the flag and the nation it represents become a target of fetishism. A specific form of fetishism in a symbolic, mystical sense — one born out of a disconnect from the everyday labor of the working class movement, an impatience with the day-to-day struggle to build and rebuild mass working class culture and institutions.
In other words, one disconnected from immanence, one which is caught up in the static and arithmetical framework of the good-bad “dialectic.” They are compensating for this disconnect from immanence, or what they perhaps see as a lack of revolutionary potential in everyday concrete practices which aren’t necessarily beholden to patriotism, by looking for a ready-made identity which can act as an immediate force of cohesion and inspiration. In a sense, they are searching for a Spear of Longinus, a holy artifact-fetish which has the power to magically create cohesion where they think day-to-day, drab labor falls short.
They compensate for a disconnect from the immanence of real, everyday forms of mass working class identification by identifying with the fetish-forms of “working class” mass-produced by the right-wing of the culture industry and media empire like Fox News, Newsmax, and the array of right-wing talking heads on social media. They think merely copying this strategy of mass appeal as-is, slapped into the context of socialism, will magically work to bring the “working class” (or the fetish-form in their heads, at least) to socialism.
Without the immanence of the real, concrete, pluralistic working class, they fall back on a magical, symbolic working class and try to uncritically imitate the Trump campaign’s populist strategy. No determinate analysis, no immanent critique, not even a serious attempt to understand the class bloc and historically inherited strategies, rhetorics, and categories at play among Trump supporters. Just a pathetic, shallow, desperate drive for a miracle by offering a mediocre substitute for something which already exists, something which swims in bourgeois society like a fish in water.
This logic is not Marxist. It is hardly even socialist. It treats the working class more like a ready-made interest group rather than a project, a political community which can compose itself, re-compose, and decompose. They take the fetish-form of the interest group “working class” as it’s given to them, as it is produced for bourgeois politicking, and try and deploy it for what amounts to a sad imitation of right-wing populism. Ultimately, their attempt to derive socialism from the “spirit” of American patriotism is closer to the fascist Oswald Spengler than Karl Marx, that German Jewish Communist Spengler despised so much:
“As far as this momentous question is concerned, Prussianism and socialism are one and the same. Up to now we have not realized this, and even today it is not yet clear. The teachings of Marx, together with class egoism, are guilty of causing both the socialist labor force and the conservative element to misunderstand each other, and thus also to misunderstand socialism.
But now it is unmistakable that they both have identical goals. Prussianism and socialism stand together in opposition to our “inner England,” against a set of attitudes that has crippled and spiritually debilitated our entire people. The danger is very great. Woe to those who hold back at this hour because of selfishness or ignorance! They will ruin others and themselves. Solidarity will mean the fulfillment of the Hohenzollern idea and at the same time the redemption of labor. There is salvation either for conservatives and workers together, or for neither.”³⁶
What a forefather of “patriotic socialism” Spengler was! Defending the bad unity of the patriotic nation against the narrow egoism at Marx, while also appealing to the special patriotic role of labor within this bad unity! Fantastic, this strategy is much greater for winning over working class white supremacists than Marx’s silly focus on the emancipation of Black labor!
This approach, already ridiculed in embryo in the form of List’s national community, entails a rejection of transcendent struggle and an embrace of whatever promotes organic cohesion in the Volksgemeinschaft, or people’s community. Contrast this to Marx’s commitment to the destruction of bad unities, to his identification in the American Civil War as an opportunity for social revolution and remaking the world anew.
The “patriotic socialists” commit themselves to a bad unity, even where they believe they commit themselves to class struggle. Their a priori reasoning, foreclosing of the possibilities of struggle and self-creation to the metaphysic of “patriotism,” and their good-bad “dialectic” represent a fundamentally conservative reason. Spengler saw Marx’s proletariat as narrowly egoistic and the Marxists as committed to an impossible universalist international, while Marx aimed at the realization of a revolutionary, universal unity of particulars through the shattering of bad unities.
For Marx, the emanation of the universal or the community is from the individual, from the subject, rather than the universal being an external, positivistic Thing standing above and forcing the many contradictions of individuals together into a nation-state community. These völkisch men, the men who committed themselves primarily to the patriotic “spirit” and often considered themselves to be socialists in this commitment to an abstract notion of the common weal, are so much like the “patriotic socialists” of today.
In their defense of bad unity, in their mystical reasoning, and in their critique of bourgeois and proletarian egoism or “materialism” from the perspective of a spiritual national community, it is no coincidence that they became fascism’s parents. To their emphasis on national particularity, on the manifestations of patriotic “spirit,” in their general reasoning, Marx would respond in his own self-defense and critique of them:
To hold that every nation goes through this development [capitalist industrialization] internally would be as absurd as the idea that every nation is bound to go through the political development of France or the philosophical development of Germany. What the nations have done as nations, they have done for human society; their whole value consists only in the fact that each single nation has accomplished for the benefit of other nations one of the main historical aspects (one of the main determinations) in the framework of which mankind has accomplished its development, and therefore after industry in England, politics in France and philosophy in Germany have been developed, they have been developed for the world, and their world-historic significance, as also that of these nations, has thereby come to an end.)³⁷
Not all of these “patriotic socialists” are necessarily headed in this direction. That is not my point. Rather, it is on the general immanent tendency in this reasoning and in this form of practice. They are a potential fascism or “reactionary socialism” growing from within the logic of socialism.
The US Empire is consciously in a period of domestic and global decline, and Americans are disillusioned with our contemporary alienated world of networked capitalism. We turn to anything, any restoration of authenticity, of autonomy, of community in our desire to escape alienation. However, false abolitions of alienation and non-transformative false revolutions represent a pitfall in this pursuit. Revolution must be universalist, it must be the realization of true newness from within the premises of the old.
Methods of abstract critique that do not start with everyday life, everyday creation and self-creation, and the immanence of the masses merely render people machines and vehicles of destiny or grand concepts. These grow in their appearance of rationality, in their “common sense,” in conjunction with a disconnect from the everyday life of the working classes and an underestimation of the potential already immanent in its struggles.
The working classes are not stupid, they are not devoid of creative and universalist thinking. They do not need to have the fetish of “patriotic socialism” jangled in their faces for them to already understand that life in capitalism is shit and what is ours is separate from and directly antagonistic to what is capital’s.
I have spent much time critiquing “patriotic socialism” in this essay. I wish to also refer back to their opposite to illustrate its own issues, so that I do not give the impression that I am operating on an either/or conception. This approach engages in an indeterminate, abstract negation of the actuality of America, lazily condemning it as purely the Bad. If the “patriotic socialists” posit that there are good and bad sides to everything, these people posit a total separateness of the Good from the Bad.
They cannot comprehend the complexities of settler-colonialism, slavery, and capitalism. For them, the participation of Indigenous nations in colonial conflicts and extermination against each other, such as in the 1872 Camp Grant Massacre, is incomprehensible. They see Indigenous as purely a homogenous category. Further, they cannot comprehend the ownership of Black slaves by free people of color in the Antebellum South. Nor can they comprehend that the Euro-American working classes have often been used as cannon fodder in the borderlands of American empire, both in subjection to danger in the midst of colonial conflict and in severe exploitation.
They wish to merely separate the history of “America” as bad and to posit a totally distinct and separate world-vision, without engaging in an immanent critique. Thus, they produce a mere negative mirror image, a refusal which is purely a refusal in reference to what is refused. György Lukács insightfully critiqued this manner of thinking in the form of the intellectual Ludwig Feuerbach:
However, if this genesis, this demonstration of the real roots of the concepts, is only the appearance of a genesis, the two basic principles of his world-view, ‘alienated’ man and the dissolution of this ‘alienation’, solidify into rigidly opposed essences. He does not dissolve the one into the other, but rejects the one and affirms (morally) the other. He opposes one readymade reality to another ready-made reality, instead of showing how the one must arise — in the dialectical process — out of the other. His ‘love’ allows the ‘alienated’ reality of man to survive unaltered, just as Kant’s Ought was incapable of changing anything in the structure of his world of being.³⁸
For Lukács, this approach fails to see the agency of the working classes in making history in everyday ways. It fails to see the potentials and possibilities even in, as in Marx’s favorite example, such mundane things as the struggle to establish what a normal working day is. It is a very all-or-nothing vision, and so easily leads to fatalism and disillusionment. If Utopia, the totally not-what-is, fails to be immediately realized, then all is lost.
In this sense — their disconnect from everyday immanence — they are very much the siblings of the “patriotic socialists,” even if the two despise each other. Where they offer an all-or-nothing, Manichaean view, the “patriotic socialists” engage in an uncritical patriotic appropriation of what is given, and foreclose all possibilities within an abstract spiritualization of it. They appropriate unchanged, ready-given categories, identifications, ideologies, blocs, and practices along with what is immanent within them — including histories of white supremacy, of genocide, and of bad unities. In this sense, this approach is like taking in a Trojan Horse, which poises to destroy the revolutionary edge of socialism and transform it into a purely rhetorical negation of things as they are.
This approach and caution is quite evident in Marx’s actual engagement with the nation and with patriotism. He rejected the patriotism of Friedrich List as an abstract, bad unity obscuring exploitative relations, though in the Union of the American Civil War he saw a temporary confluence of commitment to a nation-state and a commitment to social revolutionary Emancipation. For him, the main thing was Emancipation, and he always measured nations according to this goal. He refused fealty to the abstraction of “patriotism.”
Thus, he identified the Paris Commune not as the realization of the “substance” of the nation, but its “form” — it was not a spiritual “patriotism” but the actuality of a new community, in all of its manifold facets. The new unity of revolution is not to be a spirit nation, but an inheritor of and realization of determinate, specific historical struggles into new institutions of popular working class power — struggles local, national in form, but not foreclosed within this in substance.
Marxists can throw their weight neither with the Romantics nor with the “patriots,” but with the working classes. The working classes are not foreclosed within the abstract idea of “patriotism,” but are engaged in a continuous process of historical creation and self-composition against the decomposing forces of capital. Against abstractions, and against alienated approaches, we must take up Marx’s immanent critique as the path to realize a new unity.
“In fact, the internal obstacles seem almost greater than external difficulties. For even though the question “where from?” presents no problems, the question “where to?” is a rich source of confusion. Not only has universal anarchy broken out among the reformers, but also every individual must admit to himself that he has no precise idea about what ought to happen. However, this very defect turns to the advantage of the new movement, for it means that we do not anticipate the world with our dogmas but instead attempt to discover the new world through the critique of the old.
Hitherto philosophers have left the keys to all riddles in their desks, and the stupid, uninitiated world had only to wait around for the roasted pigeons of absolute science to fly into its open mouth. Philosophy has now become secularized and the most striking proof of this can be seen in the way that philosophical consciousness has joined battle not only outwardly, but inwardly too. If we have no business with the construction of the future or with organizing it for all time, there can still be no doubt about the task confronting us at present: the ruthless criticism of the existing order, ruthless in that it will shrink neither from its own discoveries, nor from conflict with the powers that be.”³⁹
— Karl Marx, September 1843 letter to Arnold Ruge
