Idk UK and France also make a strong case, USA is a bigger warhawk today, but in the past, they were even bigger assholes. Actually that’sa pretty tough call depending on what era

The UK is absolutely right there with America

(I’m starting to think that patsoc threads on lemmy are the equivalent of sex work threads on r/genzedong – i.e., both start as “discussions” and inevitably turn into raging dumpster fires. But I’ll chime in anyway.)

We need to be clear on what patriotism is. People use the word in several contradictory senses. Why? Because if patriotism is, literally, “love for the nation,” the word “nation” has since the 18th century taken on several different meanings; and these meanings have tended to become confused and blended in everyday speech, so that nobody – and that includes most patsocs – understands the concept at all clearly.

The formal, philosophical definition of a nation, and the one you will learn in most political science classes, goes something like this: “a group of people living in an area with legally-constituted geographical boundaries, who are defined as political subjects by having a specific legal relationship vis-a-vis their central government (citizenship).” In this sense, the nation is a purely legal construct; though it does need a certain material-historical basis, as even liberals will admit if you push them. But the idea of nations as constituted in their constitution, laws, etc., is actually quite recent; it first appears in the 18th century, and only becomes widespread with the decisive victory of liberalism in the 19th century. Which is what one would expect, from the purely idealist nature of the definition in question.

But there is an older, more material sense of nation, that most people – working people especially – still tend instinctively to use. According to this, a nation is a group of people who are bound together by common economic ties, some sort of a shared history, and an historically-forged identity that is not broken easily. Stalin used the word in this sense, and formalized it as: “A nation is a historically constituted, stable community of people, formed on the basis of a common language, territory, economic life, and psychological make-up manifested in a common culture.” This “material” nation, as the substratum of the “ideal” or legal nation, may exist through changes of government, territorial adjustments, or even fracturing of the tradition “homeland” into several different legally-constituted countries. Before their respective unification movements, Germans and Italians were widely considered “nations” in this sense, even though, politically, they were divided into a myriad of small kingdoms and principalities.

It is in this second, material sense, that a socialist should be patriotic. (Note that this material sense is not reducible to race; the fascist attempt to do so is ahistorical, and as Stalin points out, shared genetic background does not necessarily translate to shared economic interests or shared cultural identity). One loves one’s material nation, and fights for it to be legally constituted under socialism. Ultimately, of course, the international working class is the prime reality. But that international proletariat itself is not a monolithic unity, because people are never a monolithic unity. They tend to “clump” or congregate based on local interests; internationalism means getting these local interests (nations) to work together, and to see that the local interests are simply parts of a common interest. Lenin’s dictum that the true socialist fights for the destruction of his nation so that it may reborn is in fact a classic dialectical statement: the true socialist fights for the destruction of the bourgeois, and ideally-constituted, nation so that the material nation may be reborn, and find its own ideal expression that is not a construct, but flows from material reality. This is, of course, socialism.

Finally, with that said – the United States is a peculiar case. It is doubtful whether the country is really one nation in any kind of material sense. Moreover, the tendency of Americans has always been to ignore the material, economic substratum of a nation entirely, and to believe that the nation itself exists purely in the realm of the ideal – except they seem also to believe that the ideal can shape and mold the material world. Marx points out (I don’t remember where, unfortunately) that American reformers have always been content just to make a new law and leave it at that. Thus you get the belief that the legal prohibition against slavery, and the Civil Rights Act of 1964, have somehow exorcized racism from the US; or that the mere fact of having one party in office means the others have been decisively defeated. It is this facet of American patriotism – namely, its purely ideal nature – that makes it troublesome for socialism. I am not sure that if you take away the bourgeois nation-state, there will be any kind of unity remaining. It may be that in the US, socialism will have to focus on becoming something new, on growing into a Yugoslavia-like confederation of nationalities; which, to be fair, might fit well with the value most Americans put on change and inventiveness.

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The “patriotism” of “PatSocs” is vastly different. PatSocs are a very specific reactionary group with specific views here in the west.

But thy the fuck everything the anti-“patsocs” did up to date was to make the word “patriotism” haram in almost every communist space despite knowing what you said in the first paragraph yourself?

At best it’s american exceptionalism in the wild ride, and at worst an op to sow mistrust between american communists and all others. And Lemmy is still infinite better than reddit where even Genzedong banned people for even attemping to discuss it.

Idk about those “specific reactionary group” “patsoc” guys, but if they are socialchauvinists, call them what they are. Will you start to call nazis “socialists” too, because it’s in the name?

I will be respectful since you are too and i appreciate that. This is simply false. The most famous “patsoc”, Caleb Maupin, who i have followed for months now, is not what you say. He is antiracist, internationalist, antiimperialist, pro LGBTQ, pro abortion and antibigot. The dude organized trans rights marches with Mariela Castro once in his activist days. He was an activist in the Workers World Party for 8 years. He has always been outspoken about this. I have never heard any “patsocs” say the things you are saying. Not even Infrared, who i guess is closest to that in identity politics at least, has ever gone this far. And besides most “patsocs” are like Maupin, not like Infrared. This is a mythology cultivated by Vaush type people, its not a reality.

In a sense, if we are american and communists because we feel for our fellow worker, I would call that a form of patriotism. While I think patsocs have engaged too much in the culture war deligitimizing themselves being patriotic and a socialist/communist is definitely possible.

So you want your country and your people to die in misery instead of flourishing under socialism and in equality? Patriotism has been the norm in communism since Stalin, even CPUSA with all its problems acknowledges this. This is Joe Sims, General Secretary of CPUSA, in 2014:

“Yes, there is a such a thing as working-class patriotism and it is our duty to uphold and defend it while distinguishing it from the false patriotism of the ruling class and particularly its extreme right. I am discussing here the substance of the matter of patriotism.”

Source: https://www.cpusa.org/article/some-thoughts-on-patriotism-the-national-question-and-the-leninist-tradition/

I think that’s a fair take. “Does it work?” is a pretty good litmus test.

I’m not really interested enough in what Maupin has to say to look into him deeply, but the “proud patsoc” types like in the screenshot really make me sick.

“I love my country and I’m not ashamed” 🤢🤮

But even if the “true ml” needs to be international, just wanting an ml goverment first on your home region is good enough, it was what the USSR did, what china is doing now. We cant force the revolution on other countries, its literally and scientifically impossible, an country embrace the revolution when they want and when they need, we can support it when it happens, but the “socialism on one country” view still is correct at the beggining of an socialist country. If we cant succesfully realise an revolution on our own countries, how can we do this on other countries? Thats why pan-movements exist, baathism is pan arabic and socialist, you could argue it is not “true ml” because its mainly focused on arabic liberation, but does it make the movement less socialist? Just having an socialist arabic union would already be great, if all those countries standed up to unite themselves under communism, it would be great. Its not like we could even think of artificially creating revolutions on other countries.

What i am saying here is, maupin and haz are not wrong for wanting mainly an american revolution, because right now its the best they can do, it would not change anything if they openly stated that they want other countries to also have an revolution, it doesnt depend on them. What does matter would be if they would support an revolution on other countries WHEN it happens, and if they support the existing AES countries, then they would support future AES countries.

Especially considering that America is pretty damn unique. The West’s entire hegemony depends on the violence of American imperialism.

If you negate the marxist class analysis, it is. America certainly is the most evil, degenerate, lumpen place in the world, but is not exceptional.

Idk, I sure see a fuck ton of people wearing Gruntwear type clothes, “infidel” t-shirts with Amerikkkan flag skulls, thin blue line prop, and people talking about turning whoever the convenient enemy at the time into a glass parking lot or whatever.

Remember that Trump, who openly said he would bring back torture, still got nearly half the votes cast. There are a fuck ton of reactionaries in this hellscape.

Idk where you are, but in the south and vast majority of rural areas, people openly physically attack poc like my spouse for simply being around.

Pretty much nothing that the old state stood for, right? They use “German” in a few things, obviously, but they had a different flag and system of state.

What is the US?

This is where your analysis fails.

[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:

1. the complete eradication of indigenous peoples
2. a failure of the state to counter-revolutionaries leveraging the contradiction of oppressed indigenous peoples
3. 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:

1. It ignores the contradiction of oppression of indigenous peoples
2. It ignores the contradiction of the integration of oppressed peoples into the settler project
3. 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.

This comment deserves to be pinned and pointed to whenever someone brings this up again.

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)

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. 🤷

Amazing post! 100% agree!